Adrian Bonenberger, author of "Afghan Post" and veteran of two tours, reflects on the withdrawal announcement, the MRAP boondoggle, and reporting fraud
In the end, the American Empire has been about the looting of the American taxpayer in the name of spreading democracy by killing third world residents. It's a farce that serves the interests of DC in the most cynical way possible.
The heirs to Woodrow Wilson must make the world safe for democracy! Viet Nam was hardly the first unjustifiable war in our history. And we have that era and the pompous Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr to thank for the immortal "can't shout fire in a theater" 1st Amdt case that was really about protesting the war, and Holmes was defending the suppression of dissent.
Fair point. I will say in his defense about the often quoted ""shouting fire in a crowded theater" that gave us the 1919 Schenck v. United States case you accurately refer to as a travesty, OWH did spend the rest of his career walking that bad case law back, ultimately giving us the high point of US protected speech with Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, which remained the standard until the 1st amendment once again began it's decline with the internet.
OWH was deeply flawed for many reasons, but wanted to give the devil his due.
Had he been more concerned with real principle rather than his glib word-smithing, he might not have committed the error (for which he did partially repent) in the first place. And in fairness, unlike so many other progressives, he did learn from his error - at least in the matter of the free speech.
Well, we helped hatch a batch there - the Mujahedeen - to fight the Soviets. Led by the scion of a fine family loyal to our great friends the House of Saud!
I saw him on a late-night show with some other politicians and he actually said "Maybe we'd have less problems with them if we didn't mess with them all the time." IN PUBLIC!
I thought "Great morals, awful political strategy." Sadly, honest politicians are the ones who don't get elected above a certain level.
Bingo, the MIC/bankster cabal could care less about people. All they care about is more power and how to keep the shadows on the wall the center of attention for us peasants.
But big balled, limp dicked, incel Skutch and incel Scottie, they be big balled he men that won’t tolerate no child bride raping afore they get themselves one too.
I think Islam is the smallest part of why it's an awful place. I'm remembering something P.J. O'Rourke said about Yugoslavia - all of history's barbarians sent their most objectionable people around a corner while they sneaked off or somesuch, leaving behind today's population. Afghanistan is no different.
I think O'Rourke is ignoring the fact that prior to the overthrow of the Afghan Shah in 1973, the predominant form of Islam in Afghanistan was Sufism- a sect that's liberal to the point of being considered heretic by many more orthodox Muslims. Also, there was very little opium in the region until it was transformed into a cash crop to fund the anti-Soviet resistance by the Western coalition. It must have seemed like a neat idea to corrupt old fossils like Count Marenches and Bill Casey, in the Reagan era; the Carter administration had already looked the other way on hashish smuggling, but there's no real money in that, compared to the heroin trade. And then of course the Saudis had to get involved, for the juice of it, and along with all of the money they sluiced into Pakistan, they also exported Wah'habi fundie Islam to the feral orphans and refugees of the resettlement camps, who grew up getting their only schooling in Wah'habi madrassas, drilled with verses of the Koran in the original Arabic, a language they neither spoke or understood. So they literally had to take the word of their matinent arch-Salafist Arab tutors about what Allah meant. Right and wrong. Right or wrong.
There are millions of adult women who have had their genitals mutilated from another continent, child brides, forced marriages, etc that convince me otherwise.
Islam is, as Maher has observed, the mother lode of bad ideas.
You know, I have to observe that if there were millions of boy children grown to manhood whose dick was sliced off at the root... the big balled genius opining Russel Brand like cowards on this board might have a problem with Islam.
As it is, we have Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a lonely voice in the wilderness and a bunch of cowards bloviating like men.
One reform idea: Taxpayers are allowed to determined themselves (to some extend) in which budget category their tax will be spend. That would give voters at least some control over foreign policy.
Why doesn’t anybody remember the real reason we are in “endless wars” everywhere. Eisenhower warned us about the military industrial complex many years ago. Many big corporations got extremely wealthy from Vietnam. The phoney excuse then was to stop the expansion of communism. At the same time, the first chapter of the Air Force Officer Training manual stated that the domino theory no longer was valid because we had nuclear weapons. 60,000 bright young lives were sacrificed for a phoney excuse. That war also taught government that nobody had to sell war bonds to finance the nonsense, they could just take the money from taxpayers. Then it became so easy to launch wars anywhere, Kosovo, South America, Afghanistan, Iraq, or anywhere else. Now we have corporations paying for campaigns of Congressmen through the Citizens United Ruling, so money flows to fund new wars. Dick Cheney’s company, Halliburton, made 39 billion dollars from the Iraq war. No wonder he lied about “yellow cake uranium”.
Washington hated a lot of things about Trump, but the one they hated the most was his bringing the troops home and his refusal to start new wars anywhere.
Can you imagine a US President making a speech like Eisenhower's on the military industrial complex today? Illustrates the decline of our entire system. A major reason I supported Obama was that he promised to stand up to the military, but it seems like once he was in office, this entire piece of his campaign platform simply vanished, and he became the great champion of drone strikes. I'd be very interested to know exactly what happened there. Was he just making empty promises from the get go, or did something force him to change his position?
Unfortunately, he listened to Hillary. Hillary was always a hawk because Madeline Albright had counseled her that she would never have a career in politics unless she cozied up to the Joint Chiefs.
A transformative president would have to prove he can also be a great military leader/influence. Why not be the first humane military leader? To that end, A) He genuinely believed drone warfare prevented unwarranted casualties. And/or, B) He really likes the power. I am going with "B." He is really smart --- a Constitutional scholar, right? Plus he already had his World Peace bona fides per the Nobel committee. And he could trust his judgment that he would not be abusive in earning his military bona fides FOR RE-ELECTION.
But I haven't read his books, so maybe he has another explanation.
"World Peace bona fides," which I typed thinking of the Herbert Marshall character in "Foreign Correspondent." I have no idea why Obama got the Nobel Prize (and I sort of think in a moment of humility, he didn't know either). Actually, I can't think of anything in his prior career of Chicago machine/Illinois state senator/US Senator which qualified him for US President, but he won the vote, so that's how it works.
I just think the Nobel Peace Prize gives you cover on your left flank to be President Drone, which is part of the re-elect strategy.
Finally, if I have to be logical or based in reality to comment on here, I will probably have to cut down on my activity. Which I would hate, because the TKN comment section is awesome.
'I have no idea why Obama got the Nobel Prize (and I sort of think in a moment of humility, he didn't know either)'
That is so easy it qualifies as paint by numbers kindergarten - An irresistible bribe to an egoist who knew he had no business being the leader of the free world - but - he could play pretend by putting his own bust next to Martin Luther King - who actually earned his before paying with his life....
What would a MIC speech mean to today's electorate?
These are people that in many cases can't figure out a simple tax return. I had someone tell me they never file taxes today even though they get 1099'd for all their contracting income. I'm tired of explaining to people the facts of life, whatever, let the IRS audit.
I'll remind you the MIC didn't mean much to the people in 1961, either. They went full speed ahead into the dark days of Vietnam.
I suspect it would just end up being something to argue about on Substack.
It's interesting that there was enormous profiteering during every war to include WWI, but after each war the public became cynical about war profiteering and dismantled the military industrial complex, thus making it harder to start the next war.
It was a stroke of evil genius for US intelligence, the military and the government to use the media to invent the 1950's red scare and the ensuing cold war to prevent us from de-arming as we did after every other war. Fear makes all the difference.
I don't know why we even have a debate over whether congress or the president should have the right to declare war. We should be honest and simply turn the decision over the Raytheon and McDonnell Douglass. After the choose someone and give the military their marching orders, they can inform Congress, the president and the rest of what who we will be fighting this year.
No question the USSR did the bulk of the fighting and likely would have won WWII without us if given the chance.
That said, the USSR was desparately broke at the end of the war and did not yet have a nuclear deterrent. They were a threat to no one as it would take Stalin everything he had simply to hold the USSR together and rebuild it.
Stalin was in no mood for a new war. After the USSR agreed to declare war in Japan after the A Bombs per our request, they took the Kuril islands that asked Truman if they could also take Hokkaido. He told them no and despite Hokkaido being entirely unguarded, he stopped. That is not the behavior of a leader willing to risk a new war.
It's clear our intelligence agencies and our military knew this at the time, but thought a cold war would make a great narrative to prop up the military industrial complex post war and it worked. In the end, Stalin embraced the Cold War because we gave him no option, but there was O threat of the "Invasion of the Body Snatcher" version of events Hollywood sold us.
«No question the USSR did the bulk of the fighting and likely would have won WWII without us if given the chance. That said, the USSR was desparately broke at the end of the war»
In both WW1 and WW2 UK/France on one side and Russia on the other were broke and on the verge of surrender, and in both cases were bailed out by USA loans:
JM Keynes: «The financial history of the six months from the end of the summer of 1916 up to the entry of the United States into the war in April, 1917, remains to be written. Very few persons, outside the half-dozen officials of the British Treasury who lived in daily contact with the immense anxieties and impossible financial requirements of those days, can fully realize what stead-fastness and courage were needed, and how entirely hopeless the task would soon have become without the assistance of the United States Treasury.»
Andrew Marr: «Nonetheless, John Maynard Keynes, the chief economic advisor to the new Labour Government, warned ministers in August 1945 that Britain's world role was a burden which '... there is no reasonable expectation of our being able to carry [...] ' As he pointed out, the entire British war effort, including all her overseas military commitments, had only been made possible by American subsidies under the Lend-Lease programme.»
«From as early as August 1941 – just two months after the Nazi invasion of the USSR – American convoy ships supplied the Soviets with what would eventually amount to more than 14,000 airplanes, 44,000 jeeps, 375,000 trucks, 8,000 tractors and 12,000 tanks. Not to mention 1.5 million blankets, 15 million pairs of army boots, 2.6 million tons of petroleum products and 4.4 million tons of food supplies.
"The Americans gave us so many goods without which we wouldn't have been able to form our reserves and continue the war", admitted Georgy Zhukov, one of the Soviet Union's most famous WWII generals.»
A little known "detail" is that in a few years in WW2 the USA financed, built, equipped and deployed 151 (one hundred and fify one) aircraft carriers, of which 91 were small ones (equivalent to helicopter carriers today), but still...
Great citations. No question lend-lease helped the Russians and quickened their victory. No less than Stalin made room in the press to thank America in large part because he was hoping for a peaceful transition with the Americans after the war (yet more proof that this was not a man looking for a Cold War).
Useful and decisive, however, are not the same. By the time lend-lease supplies started arriving, the Winter had already bogged down operation Barbarossa and the Russian had already held Stalingrad and turned the war. The battle of Kursk, the single largest tank battle in world history between the Germans and the Russians was fought in July and August of 1943 before those troops had received anything from the lend-lease program.
That and as impressive your are numbers sound, it was a drop in the bucket compared to what the Russians war machine was producing by 1944.
We will never know if it was decisive for certain, but at the end of the war the Russians had 20 standing divisions and America had one. Without our help it might have taken the Russians 3-4 years and they would have ended up with 10 divisions instead of 20. We would have had no say in the peace and their never would have been a Bretton Woods Agreement with the dollar as the world currency. A small price for us to pay for what we got out of WWII economically for the next 70 years
The Soviet economy was only able to concentrate on arms production by ignoring food production during the crisis years of the war. They chose guns over butter. The US made sure they didn't starve with Spam and wheat. Ask Russian WWII survivors if they remember Spam.
Another thing: trucks. The Soviets built a lot of tanks and artillery, but the vehicles to tow the guns would have been in short supply. Also, those tens of thousands of Studebaker trucks absence would have made supplying the Red Army a lot harder.
Aviation gasoline, which is high octane fuel - the US supplied the chemicals.
Telephones - the US supplied the poles and the equipment.
Locomotives - US supplied a bunch
Overy - Why the Allies Won is worth a read if you are interested in this.
The Soviets would probably have lost by late 1942 if it weren't for the bulk aid.
Mellenthin's comments in Panzer Battles about seeing some hope in early 1944 with the casualties they were causing wasn't terribly far from the truth. Imagine a Soviet Union that had to minimize replacements to keep farms going to feed its population and trim back production of armored vehicles and artillery to build trucks. Imagine a more effective Luftwaffe and a less effective Red Air Force. Imagine a Red Army with significant supply problems. Then you are imagining a world without Lend-Lease aid.
Why - because Stalin was stupid enough to believe Hitler on the Non-aggression pact - and - when he came within a hairs breath of actually losing the war until Stalingrad - he sacrificed TENS OF MILLIONS OF HIS OWN MEN - in ruthless total war?
Ask the survivors of the Waffen SS who they really feared when crawling out of Russia. It was the women - and grown children - and cossacks - the same brutalized population who visited the same horrors on the French under Bonapart.
The same myth you push here was born of the idiocy that Hitler acted upon when consulting his astrologist to countermand the German High Command when neglecting to take the Caucuses and thus relieve Germany of the dependence - fatal - on Synfuels - while America had 7 of every ten gallons of gasoline for the entire war - start to finish - soup (from the ground) to nuts -( refined) - stateside - away from aerial attack - namely - Hitler's faith that the allies would never defeat Germany because of the race superiority - and the dedication the Hitler Youth engendered to prime the greatest fighting force ever to man a mechanized war.
He was half right. That German Machine - the one that royally screwed up and handed Zhukov the opportunity to open slaughter right into Berlin - was profoundly more disciplined and vicious in its execution of total war.
What the Americans did was VALUE their men and to a much lesser degree literally then - women - but - superior logistics AND brilliant Generalship - and a unique American understanding of total war - war until unconditional surrender - with the secrete sauce - the unleashed power of American innovation and the total war effort on the home front - a story never equaled before or since - where this country was able to go from the dark early days of 1942 until the Bombings of Hiroshima and Naggi.
Not that I would ever expect anyone so smart in so many irrelevant ways to get that - since such a stupid statement only reveals how ignorant you are of relevant history.
Trotsky got his Ice Pick. Nietzsche died broken in an insane asylum. God is not only alive - he has an awesome sense of humor.
Russians are brutal and prone to being mindless sheep-iles - the perfect match for the Bolshevik gangsters that sold them the Atheistic Godless commie crap that stuck in their craw for nearly 100 year run.
They never did anything near 90% - besides slaughter their own - and I suppose the purges Solzhenitsyn documented are somehow subsumed by the great work Howard Zinn left us Jonny Appleseeds?
After seeing what Stalin did in Eastern Europe in the 1940s, no sane person could not take the Soviet threat as seriously as the US did. Was Vietnam a clusterf***-yes, but just about everything else about the Cold War was justified by the knowledge available at the time, imo.
«I was in Czechoslovakia and Hungary in 1974 on a high school student tour, the rural areas were probably little changed from the 1940s, farmers with horse drawn wagons, thatch roofed houses. The cities were dismal, dirty and oppressive.»
That described conditions in 1974 in much of Ireland, Scotland, England, rural France, southern Italy, never mind Greece, Portugal or Spain (or south Korea or China-Taiwan), at the time ruled by USA loving "strong men", and those were the conditions in much of the southern USA too.
Today still those are the conditions in places like Philippines, Indonesia, central and southern America, also ruled by USA loving "strong men", and conditions are reverting to that in much of the USA rust belt and plains.
There is a big difference between being poor because of low levels of development and because of "communism".
The fear of Global Communism is ridiculous, but you will never be able to talk people of a certain age out of continuing to fear this phantasmic monster.
Russia and China are 1-party capitalist states. The USA is a 1-party capitalist state pretending to be a 2-party state. The game is over. Corporate capitalism won.
I think it was something like 500,000 injured and 58K US killed, but some 2 million Vietnamese killed. I don't think that covers others killed in Laos. A huge mess. Rinse, repeat.
Exactly. The French were defeated by the Vietnamese in 1954 at the battle of Dien Bien Phu. The victorious Vietnamese were *led by General Jiap, the *same General that the U.S. faced when *we ended up there ! The French were *expelled from SE Asia as a result of that same battle in 1954.
In return for a successful reinstatement of the French to her former colonies in SE Asia, the U.S. was also guaranteed "preferred" access to the primo Rubber Tree resources of Vietnam. This was back in the days before science had created synthetic rubber, and the *main rubber source of the time was Brazil, where Rubber Tree plantation owners were beginning to realize how much you really could get away with *charging for rubber in a world where all modern militaries everywhere depended upon rubber for Troop Transport !
That Ike ..... always the Party Pooper ! ;-D ;-D When, as an eighteen-year-old, I ended up in the Navy, I could not understand why I had never learned anything about the geography or even the names of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, etc. When I did some research, I realized that I knew the *area, but it had always been presented to me on the maps in the encyclopedias as simply "French Indochina".
The French liked to call part of the area "Cochin China". That and "Annam" and "Tonkin" would show up on maps occasionally.
Their very name for it "French Indochina" is meaningless in geographical expression, just meaning the land between India and China. But here's where you have to admire the French. They called it a "colony of exploitation", meaning economic exploitation. They refused to lie to themselves about what they were doing.
Gawd ! You're kidding ! Really *do have to give them "props" for honesty, or, at least *gall ! ;-D You are certainly correct about the relative meaninglessness of "Indochina" as a term. I remember hitting up my geography teacher in Sixth Grade because, at the time, I had never heard of the word "Indo". Apparently she hadn't either.
What was really crazy was Roger Degueldre and the Armee Secrete in Algieria. The French troops didn’t want to give up the fight-they thought DeGaulle stabbed the Pied Noirs in the back, so they rebelled and basically said “F*** it, it’s on all the way”, and started killing civilians in Algiers and Oran, and attempted multiple assasinations of DeGaulle-The Day of the Jackal was based on these dudes. Degueldre was eventually caught and executed, but France came very close to having a military coup in 1962.
This makes me have even more respect for DeGaulle. To be honest, the guy had balls of steel. He wasn't on our side, but he did the best he could for his own.
Well, except for the Pied Noirs, who he did stab in the back. Reminds me of the old saying "Two wrongs usually generate a third.", if that was an old saying.
My French teacher way back when tried to have us understand the French mentality as a declining power and to have some understanding of the lies they tell themselves on that basis.
Still partial to the Swedes - IN ORDER OF DISSAPEARANCE - and my favorite all time Irish IRA British twister - and the Late Bob Hoskins 'mr H' best performance every -
Love it. My ambition in life - after having travelled the world going to every armpit the Army seemingly sends me to, is a lengthy tour of Napoleonic battlefields, walking the Pratzen Heights near Austerlitz, stand on the Landgrafenberg outside Jena, that kind of thing. Despite all my talk about Nazis and Romans, the Napoleonic era remains my fave. But pictures like that you linked send me in another direction, at least on a delicious Medieval detour. I was cursed to be born in a country mostly lacking history. Thanks.
I remember when the Afghan Papers came out near the end of the Trump presidency. A pretty staggering piece of reporting that laid out plainly how little we were accomplishing and at how great a cost. But because both parties have been complicit in the fraud, it was politely ignored after a week or two. We seem to do the same with stories about drug pricing, student debt, law enforcement overreach, and on and on: if the GOP and Dems are in essential lockstep, the story doesn't get mainstream play for long. It doesn't work if "both sides" are villains.
You are absolutely right. Your comment reminds me of when I first became aware of a story being "politely ignored after a week or two." That was the Harper's reporting of the the torture-murders at Guantanamo Bay--backed up a by soldier who was stationed there, Joseph Hickman.
Ever since then I've seen things through the lens of how the story is being used by one side against the other, and being swept away if it looks bad for both sides.
He doesn't actually give a shit about them. He just thinks he is taking down SJW types here - not realizing he's firing at phantoms of his own mind. And he's too fucking dumb to figure it out because he's so invested in proving how tough and hard he is.
I think he's a neocon and actually supports the forever wars. Just ask him about womens' rights in a certain occupied territory if you really want to rile him up.
Exactly. I eagerly await Galleta's first-hand reports of protecting the innocent in Afghanistan. I'm sure he's busy protecting them in Saudi Arabia right now.
Geeezus you limp dicks... let’s see you at least verbalize an acknowledgment that Afghanistan is a shithole culture of women oppressing, child raping, unevolved barbarians.
You ain’t gots to travel all the way over there and take up arms.
Just try and clutch yer balls long enough to verbalize a little support for them you sorry excuses for human beings....
If I was one of them girl children, I would cheer on the destruction of the evil system that rewards them rapists by pearl clutching limp dicks that allow it to continue undeterred
Don't provide cover by calling it a "student debt crisis". It's a "college pricing scandal".
Over the last 20 years, as dissemination of all kinds of information has become almost free, college costs have risen almost as fast as medical (and with medical costs, at least we're able to do more for people. No such correlation can be observed with higher education).
That increase in tuition coincides with federal efforts to provide more funding for higher education. I am told by honorable men that this is coincidence (vomits in mouth a little).
The money has gone to dramatically bloat the "administrative layer" of universities, to no observable good effect. Should be a scandal, but all anyone wants to talk about is how to make sure the people who signed up volutarily to take on those debts don't have to pay them back. It's not fair that they should be so burdened, when, like war costs, the money can just be stolen from workers.
I'd say "hard-working taxpayers" but some of you seem to hate the group when identified that way.
Anyway, blahdeblah women most affected, and other 'disadvantaged groups'..
I was in the military during this period, although I had a cushy job compared to Mr. Bonenberger.
It's hard for non-military people to imagine what a bubble of thinking the military creates for its members. While I was in I thought Afghanistan and Iraq made sense. It took a few years of being out of that culture to realize what a horrendous mistake it was. I suppose it's what veterans of every war go through. I two used the "where helping the women and children" rationalization. I'm surprised how many people still cling to that despite all the evidence showing what bullshit it is.
The war was not just a disaster for Afghanistan and the US military, but for the US domestic population as well. Before 9/11 people in my town would openly express doubts about their government. After 9/11 people started speaking in hushed tones out of fear they would be overheard my fellow citizens or their government. I trace the culture of fear that now defines America to that. Not only did we accomplish nothing but waste a lot of money and human lives in Afghanistan, but we surrendered our rights at home under the Patriot Act and turned our domestic police force into an occupying Army with surplus weapons from the war machine through the 1033 transfers. We raised an entire generation of cops who function more like the Israeli security force than a domestic organization here to maintain the peace and order. I first witnessed what our police had become in Ferguson, MO in 2014, but it all goes back to the war.
I have a lot of sympathy for Mr. Bonenberger. It sucks when you give your life to a cause you believe in that only later you learn was a big lie actually made your country worse. He mentions Bin Laden as a cause of the war, who was still alive when I got out. I remember telling my friends when I left they needed to get that guy. It's tragic to admit now that Bin Laden accomplished all of his goals with 3 planes. He won the war by a long shot and would be proud of what he did not make this country what it has become.
Bin Laden called our bluff, the façade of our commitment to liberty. As soon as we are challenged in our comfortable lives, we turn into authoritarian, near totalitarian assholes. First drugs, then terrorism, then COVID, now "domestic white supremacist insurrectionists".
You could even add Communists & Super Predators (and prob quite a few others), IMO. To me it’s a long-running streak of obsessive hysterical idiots crying aloud, “we have to do SOMETHING!” the population going along with it, only to realize years/decades later that that “Something” was horrific and made the world a worse place than it was before.
Seems to be the theme of the 21st Century, where the phrase, “the cure is worse than the disease” has lost all meaning.
You might go all the way back to Johnson's "War on Poverty". Such a noble goal, and it enriched a whole shitload of DC apparatchick, bureaucrats and higher-level "think tank" types. Also seems to have largely achieved Pres Johnson's OTHER noble goal..."We'll have those ni**ers voting Democrat for a hundred years." But little enough actual help for the impoverished.
That's why I LITERALLY feel nauseous when I hear the smarmy, obsequious language that pours out of "well-meaning" politicians, whose goals are always noble, and whose results are always the same.
Exactly-France would not have been speaking German forever w/out US intervention, but they would have been speaking Russian by 1946......Stalin would have repeated what the Imperial army did in 1815, but w/out the niceties........
Beating the Nazis was important and stopping Stalin as well. But that is pretty much the last American foreign policy success. So time to change strategy, I would say.
I am not positive that leaving the Nazis alone wouldn't have resulted in something analogous to what we have today. Europe still has a tiny Jewish population that is hated. It's unified like the Nazis wanted to do. In the process of getting rid of the Nazis, the British Empire was destroyed as was the French analogue, and 45 years of Iron Curtain Bolshevism was put upon the countries of Eastern Europe. The Germans might have lost in the East, or they would have more likely come to some accord with the Soviets somewhere east of where the communist border ended up after WWII.
It's an intriguing thought. The Nazis mostly completed their annihilation of the Jews during WWII, there was not much more to do. Probably no Israel to roil the Mideast. True, Jews would have suffered more. Balance that out against millions who wouldn't have been killed, and those tens of millions moved around Eastern Europe postwar in ethnic cleansings with high casualties.
I fail to see how this would have been much worse than what happened otherwise.
Almost all alternative history follows a path of convergence to our world's defaults ultimately. I believe most historians believe that the events of our reality were largely fated and caused by large scale forces that essentially mandated them, so any historical futzing with the past will just be a blip and will ultimately come back to "normal".
As for what would have happened to Hitler, he wasn't destined to live forever. I would envision him being supplanted at some point by another Nazi luminary, even if he didn't make it easy by kicking the bucket. We know Stalin wasn't destined to survive the war by long. Absent those two, the nations they led were not quite as murderous. A war would have looked less and less desirable. That said, I'm not entirely certain the Soviet Union would have survived any longer. The historical forces operating against large-scale communism were and are strong.
I am pretty certain that Red China would have had a harder go of it. 1949 may not have happened the way it did. It is possible the US could have completely avoided war with Japan. So many unknowables.
About the only thing I can be sure of is that there is no guarantee that our efforts against the Nazis were actually worth it in the long run.
The question of who would have become the global hegemon in the absence of the US on the world stage is unanswered. Or, if the US took up the role, when?
I was mainly talking about the latter half of the 20th Century & what’s unfolded in the 21st Century so far, where tools of control & oppression have become vastly more sophisticated & robust.
I think your example (WW2) highlights how necessary this aversion to panics (moral/political/economic) was to *Germans* when they gave the keys to the kingdom to a genocidal psychopath out of their frustration/fear. I don’t think it’s for anybody to proclaim what kind of world we’d be in if WW2 went differently but I will say that I’m young enough (and most people are too) that I’ve never known what the world is like without nuclear weapons, and that honestly bums me out.
1) Demand the abdication of the Kaiser, and have a reparations penalty that is very large and politically unpopular, along with a war guilt clause in the peace treaty. Every time a tax increase is proposed, you will be accused of using it to pay the shitty French.
2) Have a replacement ineffectual parliamentary government with strongly represented far right and far left wing parties, with a doddering, senile President (named Hindenburg) who does as little as he can.
3) Have one of the right wing leaders discover early in his career (1923) that he would have to pretend to be conciliatory to liberal interests to get into power. After he tries his version of the Mussolini "March on Rome"
4) Have a depression that shoots up the electoral power of the populist, sneaky party to about 43% across Germany due to unemployment and the above.
5) Have a succession of two ineffectual Chancellors that are unable to do anything to relieve the economic pressure, and refuse to include your 43% in any coalition that doesn't include you as Chancellor
6) Get appointed Chancellor after they exhaust all other possibilities.
7) Have a Reichstag Fire happen/provoked, then suspend all the Communists, giving the Chancellor and his coalition partners a supermajority in the Reichstag (assembly)
8) Vote in an Enabling Act giving the Chancellor the power to rule by decree, obviating legislation, due to the national emergency
I'd like to know where in that eight point program, the German public was supposed to do something differently, given the circumstances. If the Nazis hadn't done it, the Communists might well have.
"Have a replacement ineffectual parliamentary government with strongly represented far right and far left wing parties, with a doddering, senile President ... who does as little as he can."
This seems eerily familiar... contemporary, even. I just can't quite place it.
Nuclear weapons have a big advantage in that national leaders have a lot of skin in the game now when it comes to war. So far, that has worked out to the public's advantage.
I visited Tokyo in mid August of 2002, and my American buddy and his Japanese fiancée and I were eating lunch at a swanky joint in the Ginza district-Japanese version of Upper East Side in Manhattan-on the 8th floor. We hear a commotion outside and see a bunch of dudes waving placated jumping out of vans with rising suns and writing on them.
“What’s their deal?”, I ask. “Emperor worshippers. Right wingers” replies his fiancé. “Why are they mad today?” “You oughta know, you’re the history teacher” my buddy replied. It was the anniversary of either Hiroshima or Nagasaki or the Emperor’s informal radio surrender!
The Germans were done on the Eastern Front in early 1943 with what for them was the disaster of Stalingrad. That disproved to themselves and their enemies the myth of their invincibility. The Russians could, and did, take hideous casualties and yet they killed more Germans (about 4 times more) than the rest of the Allies combined. Now, we did supply the Soviets with a lot of materiel, but they provided the bodies and the sheer will.
The first US action against German forces (roughly contemporaneous to Stalingrad) was a disaster for us. By the time of D-Day, the Germans had been on the defensive, and losing ground, in the east for more than a year.
The German decision to declare war on the U.S. was inexplicable, as they had no real solidarity with the Japanese (this is hilariously demonstrated by the non-aggression pacts the Soviets signed with each at different times - both of which undercut the other side of the Axis pact). Absent that act, the U.S. would've been hard pressed to justify entering the European theater.
The antidrug thing was from the 80s on. Interesting that we had two domestic terrorist attacks in the 90s and failed to lose our heads over them. I'm loath to give Clinton credit, but maybe focusing on getting a hummer from interns in the Oval Office is better than forever war.
The moral panic over "human trafficking" serves best as an example of how these moral panics are used.
1) Find something so horrible everyone can agree on it. (forced sexual enslavement)
2) Use certain words or a particular term, to describe it.
3) Shovel in less severe examples of the thing (in this case "pimped out prostitution), then apply it to things vaguely similar (party girls, escorts, call girls, high-level grifter/models, etc), then apply it to things that are actually a stretch (camwhores, eGirls, OnlyFans)
4) All actions taken against ANY of these things will be described by the term we use to describe the kidnapping and enslavement into horrible conditions of young women. (ref: campaign against Backpages.com.
5)
6) Profit! (in this case, political capital, increased police budgets, etc.)
For further examples of this particular abuse of language, see: "discrimination", "drug abuse", "toxic <fill in the blank>
4.5: Apply vaguely written pre-internet laws to new technology (the internet) to shrink the definition of prostitution, circumvent the Constitution and expand the definition of pimping and human trafficking beyond all recognition while using that as a platform to talk about the kind of horrendous cases you never actually find.
A point Cohen made in his 1972 paper on Moral Panics is that most moral panics involve a seed of truth that has nothing to do with the solutions that are proposed.
There are a tiny number of horrendous sex slavery horror stories and we have a pretty good idea where we can find them, (the failed foster care system, etc) but the current criminalization model is specifically designed to ignore the real victims and focus on consenting adults.
Almost all the people I see in the news these days that fit the classic stereotype of the gun wielding violent pimp also wear a blue clown suit for a living and travel with qualified impunity.
On the 5th anniversary of 9/11 we went to Shanksville. Stayed in Somerset the night before, and very early morning we went to a diner near the motel for breakfast so we could get to the memorial for sunrise. Some of the locals we talked to told us they heard that a jet had been seen in the area of the plane before it crashed --- suggesting that maybe it had been shot down? If that had been necessary, I told them, I didn't think our government was competent enough to have done it. They pretty much agreed. The courage of the Flight 93 folk still overwhelms.
His thought patterns were just what I would expect an engineer to think. 2/4 would have been what I would have expected. Security luck, heroes, engine troubles, his own people chickening out - all were considerations. Also, if we had been lucky enough to catch one early, it might have caused all of them to fail.
If we don’t get out of Afghanistan and Iraq soon I suggest we model our military command structure after King Richard The Lion-heart’s crusade’s command structure. All of the members in the executive and legislative branches of government, and their family members, need to be relocated to the battlefields so they can lead by example. Liz Cheney, dust off your combat boots honey.
Just imagine if, after 9/11, G W had, as opposed to demonstrating his tuffness [sic] by sending in the US military to Afghanistan and Iraq, clamped down on the inflow of non citizens coming into the country. Just impose some serious vetting on those wanting to come in and we probably would have been more secure than we have been since 9/11. But who would have done the work we don’t want to do, for minimum wage; right?
One aspect of Trump Derangement Syndrome that pisses me off the most is the rehabilitation of GWB among my friends who are Democrats. They began speaking fondly of the Bush Admin because they found Trump to be so horrible. Forget about all the death and destruction.
Hell no. The Bush Admin may have been the worst in modern US history. There is no level of apologetics that can make me long for the days of that particular gang of criminals.
I don’t know, they are now so tight GW & BO were recently seen in the backyard of BO’s Martha’s Vineyard mansion with a caliper trying to figure out how long they have before the sea covers the first floor and BO has to buy a bucket so the servants can start bailing.
I'm sure W is showing all of his appreciation that O was kind enough not to start an investigation into the 'errors' of the preceding administration. So of course he wouldn't criticize his successor about his own misdeeds.
GWB and BO are two assholes, (Michelle loves them both), but that home on MV is 10 feet above seal level(I've seen the contour maps) and in no danger of any threatened sea level rise during his lifetime, unlike the Trump golf course in Ireland, where he petitioned and was granted the right to build a sea wall to protect three ocean front holes, needed, as the petition claimed, because of the rise of oceans due to global climate change.
Are you one of those who think “global” climate was static until the SUV hit the road?
Also, related to another of your post, just because the Bush family and their amigos on the left claim they are conservative, it in no way means they are. There is nothing conservative about the way they wasted taxpayer’s money; and for that matter, American lives.
Since when have American conservatives been conservative with wasting taxpayer money? From Reagan on down, the only time deficits meant anything to them was when they weren't in power, "Deficits don't matter" Dick Cheney, and "Deficits are only numbers" Tom Delay. As for wasting American lives in pointless wars, which wars have conservatives been against? As a Vietnam vet and a Cold War child, the conservative cry was always about Dems losing one country after another to the communists and not being tough enough. War is bipartisan in this country, but to try and let the conservatives off the hook is intellectually dishonest.
As for "amigos on the left", the Obama/Clinton/Schumer/Pelosi clan is not even remotely left, other than on purely performative virtue signaling performances. On all substantive issues, they are solidly corporatist economically and American exceptionalist on foreign policy.
As for man's influence on climate change, I leave you with Exxon's own scientists' report of over 40 years ago citing the link between fossil fuels consumption and climate change.
Obama , of course, is a hypocrite, as is Trump, but his home is nowhere near being endangered by climate change, a falsehood I've seen promoted all over the internet, when all one has to do is look for the facts, as I did, and see his home is safe well past his worthless lifetime.
I shed no tears or Constitutional outrage for Aw-Alaki, but the drone war in Waziristan/Afghanistan is basically kids playing Space Invaders on real people w/ no on the ground intel, justification, or moral inventory by the trigger pullers.
Either being a U.S. citizen and due process of law means something or it doesn't. "The law" is essentially a game of make-believe in which most of us willingly choose to participate. It's true that the concept in itself invites mockery, but I really don't like it when it's selectively violated with no repercussions because the violator is a powerful government official. That's where we're at now.
Not to get too hyperventilated and melodramatic, but in 2011 it was al-Awlaki; tomorrow it could be me or you, depending upon how inconvenient to the regime our stated beliefs may be.
I thought Abe Lincoln and US Grant settled the question of killing US citizens engaged in treasonous/terrorist activity back in the 1860s. Native Americans have a much greater claim for moral outrage on this issue than anyone-they weren’t legally recognized as citizens until the 1920s!
That depends upon your view of whether or not speech can be considered "treasonous/terrorist activity." I'm don't know who al-Awlaki shot or blew up, if anyone. He -- and two of his children 16, and 8, also U.S. citizens -- were killed by the U.S. Government. I'm not sure what "treasonous/terrorist activity" 16- and 8-year olds are capable of getting up to.
I take your point as it stands, but even today many U.S. Southerners take a dim view of Lincoln and Grant, much as many Native Americans take a dim view of the U.S. Government in general -- in my opinion, not without justification. I don't think these questions have quite been "settled" yet.
Bush did drone kill civilians, but unlike Oshama, did not extend that to US citizens. Basically, Obama, (and Trump, even more so) fought these wars from the sky and with fewer troops on the ground, due to cost and casualty considerations. Bush, like a true conservative, had no qualms blowing large amounts of cash on the military with his boots on the ground approach.
Of course, as events have proven, all the different strategies failed, though we can take comfort that we inflicted far more casualties than we suffered, as we contemplate yet another military defeat for the world's greatest military.
Your friends who do this never had any real moral convictions or philosophical problems with W. They were just repeating their programming, just as they are doing now. What you are noticing is just how few people are actually free thinkers..
American's love ex-presidents. I remember at President Ford's funeral people in the media were talking about what a strong leader he had been. Like him or hate him, no one would have described the Ford Administration as "strong." They even had Chevy Chase out there apologizing for his SNL skits from that time.
All presidents are monsters. No one with a moral compass would take the job.
You can flip that too - the total and abject worship by the republicans and the right during Dubya's presidency has now turned into a good Mormon shunning. Why was he great then but bad now?
Oh, absolutely. But I think it's a bit more understandable for the "I supported him at the time the but he's bad now" folks, because a lot of people were hoodwinked at the time into believing the whole fake WMD story. Most people now should know better now to question what they read in the press. But yes, I absolutely agree with you that many on both sides are just following the herd.
Americans bought into the fake link between Iraq and 9-11 and the attendant WMD fiasco because the Bush administration cleverly and deliberately used existing bigotry towards Muslims in general and Arabs in particular to make a connection when anyone remotely interested could have found out that not only were bin Laden and Saddam Hussein not allies, but were blood enemies. When Hussein invaded Kuwait, bin Laden requested permission from the Saudis to use his forces to fight the Iraqis rather than the Americans. I'd like to have $5 for every time I've heard someone here say we should turn the entire ME into a parking lot and take their oil whenever we suffered some terrorist attack, even after the Oklahoma City bombing.
I'm so tired of the intellectually lazy trend to blame everything on racism. Yes, the flames of nationalism were stoked after 9/11, and neocons exploited that sentiment as much as they could. The fact is that most US citizens couldn't tell you the difference between Iraq and Afghanistan let alone point to where those countries are on a map. But somehow these same people and their bigotry are responsible for what happened? Why do lower classes who did less of the thinking and most of the bleeding get smeared with the racism charge? Why do Bush, Pelosi, Hillary and the media get a pass? The media should have laughed Bush out of the white house when he tried to connect Hussein to Bin-Laden. But they didn't. They get to have their cake and eat it too, blaming the public when things go wrong.
I will NEVER speak fondly of W The Worst. He sent close to a million people to their deaths for no fucking reason. Just the sight of him pimping his new book this week made me livid.
At the risk of reinforcing epierce labeling me as a Zionist....
W changed the entire narrative about suicide attacks for the glory of their sky god.
Prior to 9/11 with the targets of Islamic terrorism and violence being the Jews of Israel it was mostly shrugged off.
Talk about your low expectations, George Clooney and friends, CNN and crew, in fact all of Europe, Canada and the (former) British colonies can not seem to express expectations that the Islamic world evolve past barbaric, unevolved, oppressive, violent, intimidating, 1200 year old rules for life.
Great news homos.... the ‘tards negotiated your Muslim existence down to life in prison and death by honor killing.
oh, bullshit. There was never any narrative in the US news media or popular attitudes that viewed suicide attacks as anything but the most grotesque desperation. They certainly didn't move the needle in favor of sympathy for the Palestinians.
Not really, I am reflecting the truth as I watched it unfold.
Your view of desperation does not comport to the reality to me. We had plenty of warning about the intractable, violent, unevolved ideaology underlying Muslim countries in the world.
Being martyred pays off bigly to their view. In the case of Palestinians in the form of afterlife virgins they get to rape and for their families a monetary bounty from state sponsors of terror.
The door was opened for them many times. They refused to walk through it. The goal is the destruction of the Jewish state and the subsuming of Israeli Jews in a larger Muslim state. All of the arguments proffered are just window dressing.
It isn't that simple; Palestinian resistance to the nation-state of Israel has never been exclusively Muslim, and it pre-dates the influence of Islamists that predominates today.
I think you have valid points. But the critics of Israeli policy have valid points, too. If the leaders of Israel are interested in de-escalating the risk of the nation being attacked, they need to put their nuclear arms program on the table for inspection and negotiation. It just isn't a good look to be so dishonest as to continue with official denials of its existence. Israel has had atomic weapons for decades (while refusing to admit to their existence.) That only provides rationalization- and a scrim of justification- for the leaders of Iran to continue with their own atomic weapons and ballistic missile programs.
The leaders of Israel have also pursued other policies that have amounted to writing off the Arab street and Arab youth wholesale, in a region where half of the population is under the age of 22 (up from the late teens, at the beginning of this century.) Ham-handed antagonism and the pursuit of or endorsement of militarist geopolitical interventions aren't a sustainable position for Israel's peace and security. That's the only face of Israel and the West that these kids have seen in this century, and it's little wonder that so many of them are easy marks for the Jew-hating propaganda of the Islamists. There ought to be a better way to make use of the Internet age and modernity than whinging about the opportunities it provides for Islamist propaganda, and trying to restrict the Internet. That's just more of same old obsession with Power and Control. In that regard, the cyber-effort in the West that helped generate the Arab Spring was a new technology put to stale purposes. Those are 21st century features that could easily out-compete ISIS recruiting, if only they organic, decentralized efforts were directed at expanding the minds of the youth, by youth, for youth, rather than being subordinated to the paltry short-term geopolitical goals of their elders, such as being directed toward destabilization and regime change.
It's extraordinarily difficult to counsel moderation on this topic to either Zionists or anti-Zionists; I know of no other topic that's as likely to transform people of both opposing sides who are clearly highly educated and intelligent into, like, demented werewolves trying to out-paranoid each other. The worrisome thing is that the extremists are presently the people driving the policy on both sides of the conflict, and the rest of us have to share a planet with them.
A few years ago, I read a long-form Sunday edition of the comic strip Candorville, by Darrin Bell, that summed up my current position on the issue better than anything else I've ever read. I wish I had clipped it out and saved it.
Democrats only issue hall passes. They don’t issue permanent passes to the opposition. It’s all situational. W will be the bad guy again, soon enough. The democrats just need a little time to process Biden pulling the troops out, then they will turn on W so fast and furious for us being there, people will get dizzy from the spinning.
Nonsense. You're twisting history for the purpose of partisan propaganda. Probably based on the fingernail-deep erudition provided by the Limbaugh era of Hot Talk Radio, along with post-1990 TV news media, and the (mostly ghostwritten) books from the "thought leaders" elevated to Electronic Media stardom by those charades.
Read some actual deep history, for crying out loud- Partners In Power, by Roger Morris. The fearless historical inventories done by Kevin Phillips, beginning with The Politics of Rich and Poor. Look at the level of educational attainment, the career background, and the research and writing abilities of both of those guys, and it should be clear that the only thing that accounts for their decades-long status of Cancellation by nearly every American news media outlet is that they tell too much of the truth. Kevin Phillips might have gotten a handful of appearances on TV news shows upon the publication of his books like Bush Dynasty and American Theocracy- but he was quickly disappeared. Meanwhile, Roger Morris was practically made a nonperson as far as being provided airtime for his views. Morris' offense was saying many of the same things that Matt Taibbi is now saying. Twenty-five years ago.
An investigative research project I'd like to see: compare the total amount of airtime Kevin Phillips has received over the past 30 years, with the amount provided to David Gergen by CNN alone. Or by MSNBC alone.
(I also find it interesting that both the avowedly Left-leaning FAIR and the avowedly Right-leaning National Review disdain Phillips and Gergen, with FAIR putting them in the same "Beltway Establishment Republican" pigeonhole, and NR portraying them both as faux conservatives with similar liberal-massaging views...I can't say which misreading is worse. Both of those interpretations are dreadful oversimplifications. I mean, take off those ideological blinders and set aside a few hours to engage with the content of their work. Admittedly, in Gergen's case it won't take nearly that long. But Phillips was speaking out about the threat from the increasing income equality that he was noticing- and documenting- 30 years ago. And I haven't heard anybody inviting him into provide context to that discussion, which only became a hot media topic after the bottom fell out of the home mortgage market in 2008. I was noticing increasing income inequality up close and personal in 1991, the same year that The Politics of Rich and Poor was published. And to hear people twist that decades-long process into some contrast between Obama vs. Trump...how old are you, twelve?)
Beyond the fact that there's long been an unspoken agreement between the two party establishments about refraining from investigating the misdeeds of previous administrations, Bill Clinton was downright close to the late George H. W. Bush. Arkansas Governor Clinton had no reluctance to offer his state as a staging base for the Contra effort directed by Bush during the Reagan administration.
Jimmy Carter got more of a cold shoulder from his own party than has been given to any Republican President- up until the era of Donald Trump, the skunk who showed up at the Beltway Establishment's garden party.
There's been a lot of hypocritical flip flopping among people here. Among libs, only two I know continued to go to anti war rallies during the Obama years, these people now being, as you say, fans of the man they once hated, while among the people I know who voted for Trump, nearly all were strongly pro Bush and pro war back in the day, but pretend now to be the only true anti war faction.
We should go one step further and make sure that the children of the top 5% be drafted first for all wars. If we go to war with Syria we'll clear our Harvard and Yale to do it. Women too! Can't be sexist! Send them all to the front line. Let the elite show their "patriotism".
U.S. Central Command- the top level of administrative command for the Invasion and Occupation of both Iraq and Afghanistan is located at MacDill Air Force Base, on the coast of scenic Tampa Bay, Florida.
Oh so true. And since they are obviously much smarter than the average low life types in the military, they should be able to go in, create a stable Afghanistan and Iraq and still be home in time for the Hi-light of every year, the Harvard/Yale rivalry football game.
It's not that they would be any more effective, it's that they'd be willing to sacrifice themselves or their own children for profit, instead of someone elses. There would be much, much less war.
Draft women just as soon as women's reproductive rights are 100% secure in all 50 states, equal work gets equal pay and all deadbeat dads have paid up in full. Until then, hell NO!
Beau served. That was a tradition at one time. The kids of politicians enlisted. They might not have been on the front line, but they were part of the story. Can’t say it is true with now, but it was common of people in Biden’s generation.
There's a commonly used level called a General Discharge. Neither an "honorable" or a "dishonorable." Often used when separating someone from service for minor infractions.
I'm asking this because I don't know how the military works. Is it common to get a general discharge for drug use? For some reason I always thought that results in a dishonorable discharge.
Princess Cheney would counter that she already works on the front lines now. But since other residents lacked the courage to stay the course, Potomac Green Zone took its fencing down last month
Are you getting derpier? OF COURSE they have to raise prices to cover the cost of paying taxes. What does that matter if the taxes are paid and the government has the money? What the fuck are you even saying? That "the corporation" doesn't feel the "pain" of losing that money? Does that frustrate you? Would you like to stick a long needle into the corporations' leg? Do you fantasize about "hurting" the corporation? Do you think it would be better if government took all the corporations' money and then strangled it? What is wrong with you?
War has always and will always be a racket. This is yet another example of why we shouldn't allow other people to choose our friends or enemies for us. The "war on terror" in reality is a war of terror waged on the peasants by the so called elites
When you suck at leading you rely upon these sorts of tactics to make up for your lack of talent.
The reason we have the police state we currently live in is due to the war criminals within our governments and the people who own them trying to avoid justice for their crimes.
We're not being protected from anything, the elite are being protected from us.
Not until we see a war crimes tribunal, some trials, and some sentencing not corrupted by money will the human race be able to advance beyond its current dualistic ideology that keeps it so deluded that we keep falling for these bullshit us vs them fairy tales that get made up to justify the whims of yet another trust fund baby or "royal" family within the empire.
Until the war crimes trials happen things will just continue to get more brutal and cartoonish, divisive and hypocritical.
I feel so badly for these kids who got duped into this disaster as well as all the other empirical forever war "investments" that the kleptocracy has and is creating.
Smedley Butler called this shit out for what it was decades ago.
The tyranny Athens imposed on others it finally imposed on itself. Thucydides
Lust of conquest had long ago done its work; trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.
How about them Afghan girls living lives of servitude, rape and misery? Does that make yer limp dick twitch Skutch? You think it’s a higher callin to respect them goat herders right to rape than having YT try to improve it.
What the fuck is wrong with you tards? If’s you big balled, super smart, testosterone driven geniuses can’t place a girls wellbeing above those Afghans right to live undeterred you another big ole organic sack of a waste of balls and testosterone.
So are you ret-conning a whole new rationale for our being there - as a military force for feminism? Since you are so spun up for it - tell us all about your service record. Or did you join up as a merc to go do good?
I am saying the world’s girl children turn their hopeless eyes to... a bunch of limp dicks, buying into revisionist history about the greatest liberal social contracts ever being the actual scourge.
It ain’t the struggle with what to do about it I object to, it’s the limp dicked virtue signaling
Just grow yer man bun out and call yerself Russel Brand then....
::::looking through my desk for the launch codes:::::
Nope. I just can’t stand the limp dicks virtue signaling when they don’t have the balls to argue against the barbarism of Islam much less risk their own comfort to aid helpless girl children
Why aren't you in uniform then ? Nothing like a total hypocritical limp dick calling everyone else a limp dick and using neocon talking points to do it.
I like to stand on the corner and direct top-volume jeremiad at the traffic. Figuring my odds of addressing at least one appropriate target are pretty good.
How about them Saudi girls getting the same treatment ? You're using Bush admin talking points to bolster imperialism. Go grab a fucking uniform and go defend them if you actually care that much.
What is wrong with you? Stay out of the comments section if you have nothing valuable to say. And seriously change your writing to leave out your low class vocabulary.
Too bad you didn't tell either Carter or Reagan that when they decided to arm the Afghan rebels in their ultimately successful overthrow of the socialist government in that country, a government that strongly advanced the role of women in that country. Sometimes the plans we make come back to bite us in the ass, but I suppose you knew all that and strongly opposed the "Afghan freedom fighters" who were all the rage back in the day when they were willing canon fodder for the US as we played the great game. By the way, are these Afghan women the same ones we've been blowing up in various mud huts, hospitals, wedding parties and various other locations?
Still there's nothing I'm aware of keeping you from taking your 2nd Amendment implements over there, and with Little Miss Lindsey Graham, fighting to the death for the Afghan women you now care so much about. If you do go, feel free to ask for advice on being in combat; it's been awhile, but I still remember most of what I learned in Vietnam.
I served during the Vietnam debacle; after which, for a short time I actually believed the U.S. could never make so ridiculous a mistake again. Then I realized the only thing about Vietnam that the imperial war machine considered to be a mistake was that public sentiment forced an end to the "game". Were it not for the millions upon millions of deaths, casualties and lives ruined by the insanity that is us (e.g., the U.S. and our bullied and/or bought partners in playing endless war); then laughter at things like the Humvee armor "solution", etc. might bring some relief. But I find myself somberly shaking my head in disbelief, because I know there will continue to be Vietnams, Iraqs, and Afghanistans for as long as the arrogant and unrepentant imperial mindset of American "exceptionalism" exists.
We should go to war only when there's an immediate, existential threat. There are always saner options otherwise, just that they aren't as politically satisfying and don't make military contractors rich.
I'm in a rare if not unique position with two close family members with intimate knowledge of Afghanistan: one a 6-year resident of Kabul during the late 00s-early 10s (married to a native, outside the "green zone") and the other an Army medical officer deployed there twice for a total of almost 18 months. Of course even their insider perspectives are anecdotal, but nothing they told me upended my 19-year-old armchair perspective that the cause itself was unrealistic if not insane.
I finally came to the conclusions that the cause wasn't about protecting America, fixing Central Asia, or the containment of terrorists and rival powers even if that's how it might have started. The wars have become their own ends with their own constituencies that lobby for the permanent expenditures. Entire careers, companies, and bureaucracies exist solely to support the effort. And like any other bureaucracy, the first priority has become to preserve their own existence and expand their domain. We're only discussing a departure from Afghanistan because they've already replaced that war with another one in Syria or elsewhere.
Afghanistan serves a very particular purpose within the Army at least (not sure about the other Services) - a combat command tour, which is essential to promotions above COL (O-6). When that is turned off, a box will not got checked in the old resumé building process.
This is why Thomas Jefferson opposed a standing army, and why every freedom loving person should demand that Congress must declare war on a country before our military OR CONTRACTORS are allowed to take any action.
Makes you wonder if the continuity in government clause was secretly enacted. None of the branches of government really even pretend to be in control of foreign or economic policy goals any more.
No one we elect is able to do anything more than rubber stamp the white papers coming out of the (get paid what to)think tanks that the donor class own.
«a combat command tour, which is essential to promotions above COL (O-6). When that is turned off, a box will not got checked in the old resumé building process.»
Thinking "careers" indeed often helps. Someone from the UK Navy wrote an article saying that the UK navy still has many frigates not because they are useful, but because it is the smallest ship for which being the Captain counts as part of the promotion tickboxes, and changing the promotion tickboxes would be unfair to all those already in progress with the old tickboxes, because it would not allow promotion boards to compare like with like.
Definitely had nothing to do with terrorism. It's about global dominance over the peasants. Countries are too hard to control and keep track of and tend to defend their resources from exploitation by the elite.
Except that, for one reason or other, the US Military since 1945 has always tried to fight with an arm tied behind its back. We all know that the US could bomb any of these countries into the stone age - including civilians - but we choose not to. That's the bigger joke. Why fight if you really aren't interested in fighting, or don't believe that the enemy must be destroyed?
We pulled no punches with Hirohito. Or Hitler (and the Kaiser before him). Which is why neither Khrushchev or Brezhnev really threatened the USA in the Cold War era, not the Vietnam follies.
The only thing that happened is that the "fear" of fighting another war led to huge buildups in Pentagon spending and No Such Agency budget outlays.
"We should go to war only when there's an immediate, existential threat."
That would only work if the military's function was to protect the homeland. That rationale isn't even our rear view mirror anymore.
When Trump announced his withdrawal idea a military contractor was caught on tape reassuring stockholders that they shouldn't worry because there will always be a conflict somewhere needing American soldiers. He should have added that, if there isn't a reason to send them, the US propaganda machine has armies of paid spinsters who will invent a reason & then sell it to rube, dim bulb America. It really doesn't take much anymore to make large swathes of America quiver & then wet themselves. That whole "home of the brave" schtick is just a sad and sorry joke these days.
Trump's cardinal sin was not groveling before the permanent bureaucracy and supporting US involvement in Syria. Jim Jeffrey and his cohorts should be hanged for sedition because they lied to the President about troop levels and our presence there.
That is in no way hyperbole on my part. They directly disobeyed the CIC, lied to him, and bragged about it afterwards. At a minimum, they should be rotting in solitary for the rest of their miserable lives.
Go figure someone who said Trump was "not qualified to be President and Commander-in-Chief" and "would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being" wouldn't trust the Big Guy with honest info. A fantastic personnel decision among many. As always, Trump's sin was some variation on being a con man savant and an incompetent, muddle-headed buffoon otherwise.
Adrian Bonenberger: "The Taliban already have, by fairly conservative estimates, the run of 80% of the country. So the Taliban are already there. I think the hope with Afghanistan was always going to be that we could support the Afghans who are interested in a non-Taliban government for enough time for them to get their act together.
If we continue to support them diplomatically and economically, they have a chance, but in the same way that the USSR supported their communist administration in Kabul for I think two or three years before the USSR fell apart. It held on. It wasn't doing great, but it was doing okay. I think we can achieve that.
If we can’t, then that’s the most damning indictment possible of everything that we did there, including the things that I did there that I thought were good, and was doing for the right reasons. It means that all of that was just pissing in the wind. The next time we do this, I hope we’ll keep that in mind and do it better, or not at all."
Great article, but why does everybody neglect to mention that Trump was getting us out this month, Biden SLOWED that timetable and possibly endangered it altogether. Biden's trying to take credit for leaving while screwing it all up.
I don't blame you that you don't know about it because the media never reported it, but WE ALREADY HAVE A PEACE DEAL IN PLACE WITH THE TALIBAN. There's a reason they haven't targeted our troops in 14 months. We've gone right down the line doing everything we're supposed to do, and so are they. Right up until May 1st when we're still in the country.
If you're a member of the Taliban, what do you do at that point? You've given away all your leverage just to have the Americans say "fuck you." They're gonna start fighting us again, which gives us the excuse we need to stay.
Why on earth do you think withdrawal on September 11, 2021 is any more likely than May 1, 2021? It's MUCH MUCH MUCH less likely, and the Taliban know it.
So, basically, the military-industrial complex is alive and well. Great. Good to know.
I do hope that Biden follows through and pulls every single soldier out of Afghanistan. I mean, seriously, what the fuck are we even doing there? This guy Adrian has to fight his way to and from some place just to make sure a 20 million dollar “school” is being used in the way it was intended? What the fuck is that?
However, it makes me worried that if Biden does pull the military out, where are we gonna go to war next? All of that money, that 750 billion a year, has to get spent somewhere. And that means a war (or wars) somewhere. Can’t we just slash the military budget by like two-thirds (or more) and spend that money here? On something that actually benefits the US? On healthcare, on the homeless, on infrastructure etc etc etc... Its fucking absurd, the amount of money that we spend on the military. And, apparently, it’s not even doing any good. The Taliban has 80% of Afghanistan, even though we’ve been there for two decades. Two decades! What the fuck?
I don’t think you get it. “Winning” is not the objective. The objective is to continue to funnel taxpayer dollars into the military-industrial complex, to fund never-ending “wars.” If we won wars, there’d be no reason for companies like Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, Boeing etc etc to get paid. The goal is to drag this shit on forever, with no end in sight.
"The USA will probably lose any Biden War, probably badly. The military elites are saturated with sociopathic careerists, mostly incompetent."
I openly ask for evidence of any unambiguous US military victory since WWII. You can say Grenada or Panama and I'll grudgingly accept it, but it's peanut-gallery stuff.
The World's Much-Vaunted Greatest Military Power has been getting its ass kicked by shoeless, skinny Somalis and Afghans for decades. I suspect, but cannot confirm, that this might have something to do with the DOD's business model of keeping most of the troops on gigantic bases where they can go eat at Chili's and stay out of harm's way.
zackly. And that is what minitiger notes: the GOAL of our military (the top brass) has nothing to do with winning conflicts, rather it's to make necessary, as much as possible, the ongoing flow of big dollah to defense contractors. This provides them with the benefits of being lobbied by said contractors as well as cushy jobs on retirement. Which is what e.pierce pointed out.
How the two of them managed to turn that into a "disagreement", when they said two different-but-perfectly-compatible (and largely true) things is mystifying.
'I openly ask for evidence of any unambiguous US military victory since WWII. You can say Grenada or Panama and I'll grudgingly accept it, but it's peanut-gallery stuff.'
Ok. In comparison to what? Who keeps the world trade lanes open for business - as ugly as it is? Why is Israel still on a map? What convinces Xi that only exporting a few free Hong Kong 'radicals' in the dead of night - rather than the en mass route Mao so often took - and - why is Miles Guo still living?
The only thing worse than AmeriKa and it's mistakes - is a world with the weakened America Obama has envisioned - who cant make those mistakes since they no longer have the power to do so - a theory we are rapidly moving towards as a final test...
Wish somebody with on-the-ground or in-the air-experience in the 1999 Kosovo fiasco felt like dropping details. If you have any good links, please post.
Canadians financed a dam in Afghanistan. Our soldiers helped build it and protect it. Now there is no water in it and the road to it is falling apart. What is happening now was inevitable. We gave these people false hope and now they will suffer. These societies will only change from the inside. Better that we never were there.
I was a Camp Nathan Smith in Kandahar in 2011 when the Canadian made the right call and pulled out (see my post above). The new four-star, Gen, Chrystal, didn't think the Canadians were killing enough locals. The Dahla Dam project was a fiasco like most of the $150 billion spent on worthless infrastructure projects. Too bad the US didn't follow the Canadian's lead
Is it possible you would want to live a life of hopeless drudgery and rape over ending the evil that created it?
What is it about being married off to a creepy old rapist against your will as a 9 year old that you think brings serendipitous joy? Your 9th bday party is your wedding day, you get sold off and raped, but the humus that day was to die for....
How about, it’s not our problem? How about, the issues in Afghanistan continue to exist, despite the trillions of dollars spent and the thousands of US soldiers killed? It says right here in this interview that the Taliban controls 80% of Afghanistan. So, what? We spent 750 billion dollars a year for twenty years to make sure that 20% of Afghanistan wasn’t under the control of the Taliban? All of that money could have gone to fixing issues right here in the US. It could have gone to providing healthcare for everybody, paying teachers, fixing infrastructure and on and on...
Truly, 95% of our personal, domestic and international problems with others would be solved by stopping, thinking about things, then deciding it's none of our fucking business.
Remind me, how many Afghanis were part of the 9/11 attack? For some reason, I seem to recall the overwhelming majority of perps carried Saudi passports.
Besides, woman in Afghanistan are just fine. If they weren't surely you'd have heard something about their plight fromj the dedicated feminists here in the West.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, even if you don’t feel a blessing of birth and privilege carries a responsibility to those less fortunately born, it is becoming a western problem. British Afghanis going back to acquire child brides. Is it ok with you then if child rape gets refugee status too?
I feel so blessed that I think we should bomb the fuck out of an entire country for 20 years while sanctioning the rest of the world in order to starve everyone else around that country.
Um.... What? What are you even talking about? “A blessing of birth and privilege”? Check your Google translate. And no, it’s not okay with me if a kid gets raped, but apparently a twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan hasn’t stopped that from happening. So probably we should just move on. Or out. Or something.
What about being bombed and maimed by a drone attack or having your family wiped out while you hobble around all burned with missing limbs all in the name of bringing "democracy" to your country ?
Seriously, entertain the idea that the women abusing, child raping Islamic cultures got the idea it was change or be completely destroyed....
Ok. They are so low iq they prolly would go for systemic destruction....
And the world would be freed from a tyrannous sky god....
None of you tards would have a prob going after Roy Moore for courting a teenager... wut is it about child raping goat herders that hits ya in the feels?
Posit: you are super respectful of the planet’s Southern Hemisphere because you’re limp dicks. You’re scared you really will be Charlie Hebdo and so your contort nonsense theories about YT being the scourge of the earth and turn a blind eye to widespread child rape through enforced marriages against their will.
What to do is a problem. One opens themselves up to accusations from the Russel Brand crew just by trying. Nevertheless, those are real women and children, homos, heretics and infidels who are suffering in Afghanistan, with or without America and Russia’s proxy wars
We have enough Christian woman abusing, child raping going on with our own Christian culture.
How about we solve our own issues so we actually learn how to fix it before we try to "fix" someone else's culture ????
Besides, the cost is far too high to the Afghani children since it means turning their country into a rubble pile and getting them hopelessly into debt to the actual terrorists on Wall Street.
Understanding that we can't "nuke" anyone, without having the radioactive fallout carried by the weather come clear around the Globe into our *own faces, right ? Even Regan finally came to understand that concept of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction).
The nukes used during WWII were nothing but "marbles" compared to the destructive capacity of today's atomic weaponry. "Nuke 'em" is a call for global suicide. I wonder how many outside of the military fully understand it that way.
I generally ignore the "just nuke 'em" crowd as the unserious who think Dr. Strangelove is a documentary. Still, I'm amazed how many otherwise informed people don't understand the political and military problems with "just nuking" the people we don't like.
That and Afghanistan was and is more of a failed State than a county, so you would not be bombing the country responsible for 9/11. You would be bombing a paramilitary group that set up shop there along with an awful lot of innocent people who had nothing to do with 9/11. America would become a permanent pariah in the world and if you think as 5% of the world population we can just go it alone, you really are unserious.
Well, of course, what you have touched upon there, is the serious "dumbing down" of the U.S. population, at least since Reagan seriously set out to do exactly that in 1980. That administration started out by removing "Civics" classed from Public Grade Schools, bcuz that was the first course that encouraged "critical thinking" in children, and taught them about the way the U.S. Government is *supposed to be made up of Three CO-EQUAL branches establishing a system of Checks and Balances *intended to prevent Monarch Presidents in the U.S. People who feel welcome to join in discussions of complicated issues with ignorant contributions like "Nuke 'em" simply expose their own absence of intellect. I am personally very fond of a particular quote:
"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt." ~ Abraham Lincoln
I think that's a really good take. I also think many American's are froze in time with America and Europe dictating terms to the rest of the world without needing to worry about the consequences.
I see occasional comments here about how either Europe of America should not have allowed another other country to do something. It's as if they are present at the Sykes-Picot agreement and deciding the fate of the rest of the world. That was WWI and we have come a long ways ever from WWII when everywhere but American was in rubble. This idea that any country can act on the world stage today without serious consequences within a largely pluralistic system in not realistic.
Very well analyzed ! It all puts me in mind of an old Al Stewart song "Year of the Fox", where he includes the old Mystic's Observation "Oh, the more it changes, the more it stays the same." Even today, we have a country in the form of Russia that just "casually" takes the Crimea away from the Ukraine, and suffers nothing but a social "cold shoulder" from the rest of the Western World. Just like the mass killing here at home, we are fast approaching a point where "Thoughts and Prayers" are quickly wearing out, and predictably demonstrating their well-known impotence.
Seriously, if you don’t defend female agency, childhood free of enforced marriages, genital cutting, homo lynching, infidel terrorizing (let’s just acknowledge the new found “respect for Islam” is cowardice of ending up like Charlie Hebdo), heretic murdering, barbaric public beatings, choppings, murdering, the freedom from religion and the protection of liberal societies such as they are.....
It’s your cowardice.... you aren’t more nuanced or intelligent... you’re simply rationalizing your cowardice.
Maybe so. The guest in the interview indicated it is a motivation for those wearing the boots on the ground.
At any rate, in a country where might makes right and the most vulnerable, ie little girls, are traded like chattel to be domestic/sex slaves to old creeps and told it’s the all powerful SkyGawd’s wish she be so used, I got no problem with that.
that is exactly why I can view the soldiers of a war as noble and the war corrupt and deceptive. Soldiers and citizens are sold bullshit in order to fuel a different objective. That is the crime I find unforgivable.
You know, at any time the so called geniuses of the Democratic Party could offer a middle way and denounce the goat herding child rapists, loudly decry the mutilation of girl children genitals in service of some religion inspired focus on female sexual purity, take a strong position on honour cultures and their violent cultural response to infidelity, heresy, infidels and homosexuality, etc etc etc....
But I won’t hold my breath. It’s cool and hip to be Sarsour but being Ayaan Hirsi Ali is hazardous to your health, and western liberals are nothing if not performative about courage whilst consistently cowardly in the face of real oppression.
Might makes right all over the planet to this day. Go stand under some of our bombs or live under some of our sanctions. No one in the US military or government gives a rat's hairy ass about those little girls or anyone else not rich or on TV.
You're so indoctrinated you're still spewing the same demonizing generalizations CNN/Fox/MSNBC was in the early 2000's.
I would love to see you debate Ayaan Hirsi Ali. That’s where the reality for women and girls, homos, heretics and infidels “rubber” hits the road.
You cuck sucking western ‘tards are able to excuse any barbarism as long as the price is paid by women, children, homos, heretics and infidels, stupidly betraying your belief - like the US govt of the pre 9/11 era in their arrogance assumed - that you will be removed from the consequences of the worlds least tolerant and evolved reproducing faster, in bigger numbers and without female agency.
I think you've proven yourself to be the least rational person to ever post on the internet with this gem.
I guess no girls, homo's, heretics or infidels have been collateral damage over the last 20 years inside Afghanistan or the other 7 or so countries targeted by the 5 eyes cabal then ??
Hilarious that anyone still buys this "belief" that we're in the middles east to liberate the people that live there !!!
Yeah. I get it man. You sooooo cooool. When you see them short Islamic women’s paraded by in sacks with slits for their eyes, just pat yerself on the back ‘tard... you helped that little girl to a life of non control by ‘tards.
That's a sneering caricature and a generalization that's quite sweeping. But for someone who plainly favors annihilation as the optimal remedy for the problems afflicting the societies that you speak of, I doubt that it matters.
Espousing that policy isn't likely to win over many undecided people to the cause of Zionism, either. But I'm well aware that there's a strain of thought embraced by some (although not all) Zionists that basically views all non-Jews as a lost cause as far as sincere sympathy or authentic alliance anyway. An attitude all too reminiscent of the certitude that differentiates paranoid psychosis from mere wariness and vigilance.
You make this about me because you are a craven coward that would stand by and watch girl children married off before puberty to British (or American or New Zealand or Australian or Canadian ear European) Islamic creeps against their will, to live a life of servitude and rape, dressed in a sack and paraded down your sidewalks rather than confront a undeniably illiberal culture you invited in and greeted at airports with welcome signs.
Now they are determining what children are taught at public school.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan absolutely achieved their sole objective, which was to transfer an enormous amount of money to the defense industry. Mission Accomplished indeed.
In the documentary "A Good American," Bill Binney recalls overhearing a new NSA "executive" telling his former employer--a big contractor--"We can milk this for about 15 years,"--referring to 9/11.
We seem to relearn this after every war, then forget it by the next one. From "Remember the Maine!" to "The Lusitania" to The Gulf of Tonkin, the government doesn't even bother changing the play book since they know it will work every time.
I think the real problem here is the naivete of the general public. No war is clean in any age. There were issues on both sides. If we were going to be Solomon, the reasons why might be meaningful, but we aren't. We just fight on one side or another, with more or less justification. The stupids read or hear their press coverage and start being sappily patriotic.
Reading the after-the-fact bs here is funny and sad at the same time. How many voices were in honest opposition when the AUMF was passed? But then a few years later, when the Blackwater video showed people what real war is like (yes, it is like that sometimes), then they were against it. When they saw Abu Ghraib and people being led around on dog leashes and such, it was so, so terrible, but every war I have ever heard of had that kind of thing and worse. Much worse.
Clausewitz posited that war was an extension of politics/policy by other means. Why people get so shocked that those other means give license to sociopaths and psychopaths in uniform is the part I can't get.
If these same people ever got to hear the very loose relationship between the rules of land warfare and how such warfare is conducted, even by the US, their panties might twist up so much they'd never be straight again.
Well, you can say naivete, but you can't deny that the naivete is a result of being misinformed. And there, I think the absence of an adversarial media sector is key. The efforts towards making the media more monolithic should be considered actions inimical to the American public.
Doesn't EVERYBODY get a chill when gov't officials or Big Tech execs claim they "just want to stop the spread of misinformation"??
yes on the misinformation crap. That just sounds like propaganda to me.
That said, the public was no better informed about actual warfare in the 1960s-70s, 1950s, 1940s or 1910s. Or in 1898-1904. What they got from the media was a very much more sanitized view of what was happening than today. They got pictures of a flag raising on Iwo Jima but no pictures of all the corpses piled up, severed limbs, etc.
In the 1860s, people were all too well informed of what was happening. But war has changed a lot since then.
If your son got killed in a battle in the 1860s, it was likely (if you had the means) you would take the trip to the place where he was killed to recover him and bring him home. Railroads at a certain point refused to carry bodies unless they were sealed in iron caskets. They'd had too many issues with leaking bodily fluids over weeklong trips back home.
Fun fact: Did you know that during the Civil War there were cases where bodies were embalmed by morticians who followed the troops around like camp followers, and then they refused to give the corpse to the family unless they paid the costs, which they hadn't agreed to in the first place.
Today, you get a closed casket (mostly). A triangular box with a flag in it. A lot of condolences and $100k or so. Your relationship with the ugliness of war and combat death is minimal.
When the Russians were in Afghanistan I can remember CBS Dan Rather gleefully promoting U.S. support for the rebels(Taliban) as a kind of payback for Vietnam. The Soviets had dared to support a government that had advanced women into professions like teachers and doctors. So we gave them stinger missiles to avenge the affront while our Saudi allies "educated" them in their fanatical Wahhabi doctrine. It should have been no surprise that those who train dogs to be vicious end up being bitten on the ass.
Have not kept up with Handsome Dan's geopolitical reportage in about a decade, but I remember his pseudo-anthropological journalism packages from Kabul for 60 Minutes before that, as recently as the 2nd Bush Administration. He/his producers reliably highlighted the Western-friendly man on the street. This really was as misleading as 1970s news-magazine media explaining the world from a French-style hotel in Saigon
And yet, Rachel Maddow can without irony, and certainly without evidence, decry the anonymous CIA claim that the Russians are paying the Taliban “bounties” for killing US soldiers. And she will never, ever apologize for spewing this nonsense.
I lived and worked in Afghanistan for seven years (2008-14) for USAID as both a contractor and federal employee. I share and can corroborate the "you'll never believe this" stories and misguided experiences Mr. Bonenburger recounts in this article. As a "wrap" on the MRAP fiasco, I was at Kandahar Airfield in in 2013 when it became the largest chop-shop in the world: hundreds of the unwanted MRPAS (rollover prone, maintenance nightmare, gas guzzling behemoths ) had to be cut into scrap metal so Taliban would not get them after the base closures and drawdown of US forces. (The Soviets just left their tanks and armored vehicles behind and their rusting hulks noe litter the Afghanistan landscape as a reminder of the last failed foreign invasion/occupation of the country.)
I, too, wrote a memoir on my experiences as a "nation builder" in Afghanistan, as well as the year (2007-08) I spent in Iraq during the surge there when the burn-rate of US tax dollars was $10 billion/month. Think of how many airport modernizations and high-speed rail projects this money could have funded. I titled my book "When Will We Ever Learn." Just google my last name "Enzweiler" in the Amazon search bar and it will come up. It's free for Kindle Unlimited.
I chose this title because I was on Guan as a 2nd lieutenant USAF officer in late 1972 when the B-52s and KC-135 tankers from my base in SD mercilessly bombed Hanoi and Haiphong. As diplomat John Negroponte later remarked, "We bombed them (the North Vietnamese) into accepting our concessions." I recalled this quote one night in 2014 before I left at KAF as I was awakened by the F-16s taking off on another raid on some hapless Afghan village. As things have since transpired in Afghanistan (and as I predicted in in 2017 book), our country once again got involved in another foolish "war of choice" and carried out merciless bombing campaigns (with Trump and Mathis/McMaster in the roles of Nixon and McNamara/Kissinger) knowing the war effort was a lost cause. Once again we immorally bombed the local national resistance fighters (this time the Taliban) into accepting our concessions -- and got the same deal they agreed to ten years ago. It was "deja vue all over again" for me, as I recount in my book.
The details are often the result of narrow mindedness and incompetence, but most of the "useless" invasions the USA does have sound geopolitical aims, in the case of Afghanistan (and several other places) the main aim was to reduce it to rubble to deny it to others, specifically to landlock Russia and China. Some of the key words to understand the geopolitical significance of Afghanistan are Chabahr and Gwadar.
In the end, the American Empire has been about the looting of the American taxpayer in the name of spreading democracy by killing third world residents. It's a farce that serves the interests of DC in the most cynical way possible.
The heirs to Woodrow Wilson must make the world safe for democracy! Viet Nam was hardly the first unjustifiable war in our history. And we have that era and the pompous Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr to thank for the immortal "can't shout fire in a theater" 1st Amdt case that was really about protesting the war, and Holmes was defending the suppression of dissent.
War is the health of the state!
Fair point. I will say in his defense about the often quoted ""shouting fire in a crowded theater" that gave us the 1919 Schenck v. United States case you accurately refer to as a travesty, OWH did spend the rest of his career walking that bad case law back, ultimately giving us the high point of US protected speech with Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, which remained the standard until the 1st amendment once again began it's decline with the internet.
OWH was deeply flawed for many reasons, but wanted to give the devil his due.
Had he been more concerned with real principle rather than his glib word-smithing, he might not have committed the error (for which he did partially repent) in the first place. And in fairness, unlike so many other progressives, he did learn from his error - at least in the matter of the free speech.
And Afghanistan is a shithole that breeds terrorists.... with or without US troops....
Well, we helped hatch a batch there - the Mujahedeen - to fight the Soviets. Led by the scion of a fine family loyal to our great friends the House of Saud!
Much less defensible to my view
The term is blow-back. Ron Paul used it and set himself apart as a pariah to all good-thinkers.
I saw him on a late-night show with some other politicians and he actually said "Maybe we'd have less problems with them if we didn't mess with them all the time." IN PUBLIC!
I thought "Great morals, awful political strategy." Sadly, honest politicians are the ones who don't get elected above a certain level.
LOL Sure.. but not until the major players all lined up to go in and reap the benefits of all of that heroin.
The UK, Russia... The US. It's been made into an anti imperial shithole from 800 years of imperialists coming in to rape and pillage freely.
So where does it go now? Probably back to the stone age again haha
The rub here is that the media lied about it and repeated the lies of the state to continue funneling money into war industry pockets.
It's a sham, whether or not the Afghanis are "good" or "evil".
Doesn't matter.
Bingo, the MIC/bankster cabal could care less about people. All they care about is more power and how to keep the shadows on the wall the center of attention for us peasants.
But big balled, limp dicked, incel Skutch and incel Scottie, they be big balled he men that won’t tolerate no child bride raping afore they get themselves one too.
No. It’s an Islamic shithole with or with imperial YT, despite a whole lot of attention and money... they refuse to evolve
I think Islam is the smallest part of why it's an awful place. I'm remembering something P.J. O'Rourke said about Yugoslavia - all of history's barbarians sent their most objectionable people around a corner while they sneaked off or somesuch, leaving behind today's population. Afghanistan is no different.
I think O'Rourke is ignoring the fact that prior to the overthrow of the Afghan Shah in 1973, the predominant form of Islam in Afghanistan was Sufism- a sect that's liberal to the point of being considered heretic by many more orthodox Muslims. Also, there was very little opium in the region until it was transformed into a cash crop to fund the anti-Soviet resistance by the Western coalition. It must have seemed like a neat idea to corrupt old fossils like Count Marenches and Bill Casey, in the Reagan era; the Carter administration had already looked the other way on hashish smuggling, but there's no real money in that, compared to the heroin trade. And then of course the Saudis had to get involved, for the juice of it, and along with all of the money they sluiced into Pakistan, they also exported Wah'habi fundie Islam to the feral orphans and refugees of the resettlement camps, who grew up getting their only schooling in Wah'habi madrassas, drilled with verses of the Koran in the original Arabic, a language they neither spoke or understood. So they literally had to take the word of their matinent arch-Salafist Arab tutors about what Allah meant. Right and wrong. Right or wrong.
There are millions of adult women who have had their genitals mutilated from another continent, child brides, forced marriages, etc that convince me otherwise.
Islam is, as Maher has observed, the mother lode of bad ideas.
You know, I have to observe that if there were millions of boy children grown to manhood whose dick was sliced off at the root... the big balled genius opining Russel Brand like cowards on this board might have a problem with Islam.
As it is, we have Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a lonely voice in the wilderness and a bunch of cowards bloviating like men.
It breeds far fewer terrorists than the US empire and its allies.
Yeah because it’s a shithole....
The pedophilia and goat raping over there are not jokes, but real, common cultural/sexual practices
You don’t say. Michael T is a aspiring to join the enlightened ones... maybe he could get some one he could force to suck his dick
Dress up like a girl and parachute yerself in big balls....
They could fucking nuke the entire Gawd foresaken shithole and the planet would suffer less misery
I wonder if the Spanish Flu may have been, partially at least, a way for young men to avoid the WWI draft and disappear.
These have been sold as spreading democracy in the press to get public support. The real motivations depend on the region.
One reform idea: Taxpayers are allowed to determined themselves (to some extend) in which budget category their tax will be spend. That would give voters at least some control over foreign policy.
Why doesn’t anybody remember the real reason we are in “endless wars” everywhere. Eisenhower warned us about the military industrial complex many years ago. Many big corporations got extremely wealthy from Vietnam. The phoney excuse then was to stop the expansion of communism. At the same time, the first chapter of the Air Force Officer Training manual stated that the domino theory no longer was valid because we had nuclear weapons. 60,000 bright young lives were sacrificed for a phoney excuse. That war also taught government that nobody had to sell war bonds to finance the nonsense, they could just take the money from taxpayers. Then it became so easy to launch wars anywhere, Kosovo, South America, Afghanistan, Iraq, or anywhere else. Now we have corporations paying for campaigns of Congressmen through the Citizens United Ruling, so money flows to fund new wars. Dick Cheney’s company, Halliburton, made 39 billion dollars from the Iraq war. No wonder he lied about “yellow cake uranium”.
Washington hated a lot of things about Trump, but the one they hated the most was his bringing the troops home and his refusal to start new wars anywhere.
Can you imagine a US President making a speech like Eisenhower's on the military industrial complex today? Illustrates the decline of our entire system. A major reason I supported Obama was that he promised to stand up to the military, but it seems like once he was in office, this entire piece of his campaign platform simply vanished, and he became the great champion of drone strikes. I'd be very interested to know exactly what happened there. Was he just making empty promises from the get go, or did something force him to change his position?
Unfortunately, he listened to Hillary. Hillary was always a hawk because Madeline Albright had counseled her that she would never have a career in politics unless she cozied up to the Joint Chiefs.
A transformative president would have to prove he can also be a great military leader/influence. Why not be the first humane military leader? To that end, A) He genuinely believed drone warfare prevented unwarranted casualties. And/or, B) He really likes the power. I am going with "B." He is really smart --- a Constitutional scholar, right? Plus he already had his World Peace bona fides per the Nobel committee. And he could trust his judgment that he would not be abusive in earning his military bona fides FOR RE-ELECTION.
But I haven't read his books, so maybe he has another explanation.
Pardon my miscomprehension here, but can you clarify exactly WHAT in Obama's prior career, constituted "Nobel Prize bona fides"??
OR are you saying "Look! He's got the Prize, therefore, Champion of Peace."
Because I don't think that's how logic, or reality, work.
"World Peace bona fides," which I typed thinking of the Herbert Marshall character in "Foreign Correspondent." I have no idea why Obama got the Nobel Prize (and I sort of think in a moment of humility, he didn't know either). Actually, I can't think of anything in his prior career of Chicago machine/Illinois state senator/US Senator which qualified him for US President, but he won the vote, so that's how it works.
I just think the Nobel Peace Prize gives you cover on your left flank to be President Drone, which is part of the re-elect strategy.
Finally, if I have to be logical or based in reality to comment on here, I will probably have to cut down on my activity. Which I would hate, because the TKN comment section is awesome.
'I have no idea why Obama got the Nobel Prize (and I sort of think in a moment of humility, he didn't know either)'
That is so easy it qualifies as paint by numbers kindergarten - An irresistible bribe to an egoist who knew he had no business being the leader of the free world - but - he could play pretend by putting his own bust next to Martin Luther King - who actually earned his before paying with his life....
Who is “B”? You can’t mean Biden. 🤷♀️
A &/or B = suggested choices as to why Obama appeared to become "the great champion of drone strikes . . ."
OK, sorry, I read it wrong. Obama was busy being Mr. Nice Guy, but his arrogance fueled an out-of-control power trip.
What would a MIC speech mean to today's electorate?
These are people that in many cases can't figure out a simple tax return. I had someone tell me they never file taxes today even though they get 1099'd for all their contracting income. I'm tired of explaining to people the facts of life, whatever, let the IRS audit.
I'll remind you the MIC didn't mean much to the people in 1961, either. They went full speed ahead into the dark days of Vietnam.
I suspect it would just end up being something to argue about on Substack.
No new wars. So proud of Trump and his foreign policy. He exposed the slime in DC
It's interesting that there was enormous profiteering during every war to include WWI, but after each war the public became cynical about war profiteering and dismantled the military industrial complex, thus making it harder to start the next war.
It was a stroke of evil genius for US intelligence, the military and the government to use the media to invent the 1950's red scare and the ensuing cold war to prevent us from de-arming as we did after every other war. Fear makes all the difference.
I don't know why we even have a debate over whether congress or the president should have the right to declare war. We should be honest and simply turn the decision over the Raytheon and McDonnell Douglass. After the choose someone and give the military their marching orders, they can inform Congress, the president and the rest of what who we will be fighting this year.
I think you're half right.
No question the USSR did the bulk of the fighting and likely would have won WWII without us if given the chance.
That said, the USSR was desparately broke at the end of the war and did not yet have a nuclear deterrent. They were a threat to no one as it would take Stalin everything he had simply to hold the USSR together and rebuild it.
Stalin was in no mood for a new war. After the USSR agreed to declare war in Japan after the A Bombs per our request, they took the Kuril islands that asked Truman if they could also take Hokkaido. He told them no and despite Hokkaido being entirely unguarded, he stopped. That is not the behavior of a leader willing to risk a new war.
It's clear our intelligence agencies and our military knew this at the time, but thought a cold war would make a great narrative to prop up the military industrial complex post war and it worked. In the end, Stalin embraced the Cold War because we gave him no option, but there was O threat of the "Invasion of the Body Snatcher" version of events Hollywood sold us.
«No question the USSR did the bulk of the fighting and likely would have won WWII without us if given the chance. That said, the USSR was desparately broke at the end of the war»
In both WW1 and WW2 UK/France on one side and Russia on the other were broke and on the verge of surrender, and in both cases were bailed out by USA loans:
JM Keynes: «The financial history of the six months from the end of the summer of 1916 up to the entry of the United States into the war in April, 1917, remains to be written. Very few persons, outside the half-dozen officials of the British Treasury who lived in daily contact with the immense anxieties and impossible financial requirements of those days, can fully realize what stead-fastness and courage were needed, and how entirely hopeless the task would soon have become without the assistance of the United States Treasury.»
Andrew Marr: «Nonetheless, John Maynard Keynes, the chief economic advisor to the new Labour Government, warned ministers in August 1945 that Britain's world role was a burden which '... there is no reasonable expectation of our being able to carry [...] ' As he pointed out, the entire British war effort, including all her overseas military commitments, had only been made possible by American subsidies under the Lend-Lease programme.»
«From as early as August 1941 – just two months after the Nazi invasion of the USSR – American convoy ships supplied the Soviets with what would eventually amount to more than 14,000 airplanes, 44,000 jeeps, 375,000 trucks, 8,000 tractors and 12,000 tanks. Not to mention 1.5 million blankets, 15 million pairs of army boots, 2.6 million tons of petroleum products and 4.4 million tons of food supplies.
"The Americans gave us so many goods without which we wouldn't have been able to form our reserves and continue the war", admitted Georgy Zhukov, one of the Soviet Union's most famous WWII generals.»
A little known "detail" is that in a few years in WW2 the USA financed, built, equipped and deployed 151 (one hundred and fify one) aircraft carriers, of which 91 were small ones (equivalent to helicopter carriers today), but still...
Great citations. No question lend-lease helped the Russians and quickened their victory. No less than Stalin made room in the press to thank America in large part because he was hoping for a peaceful transition with the Americans after the war (yet more proof that this was not a man looking for a Cold War).
Useful and decisive, however, are not the same. By the time lend-lease supplies started arriving, the Winter had already bogged down operation Barbarossa and the Russian had already held Stalingrad and turned the war. The battle of Kursk, the single largest tank battle in world history between the Germans and the Russians was fought in July and August of 1943 before those troops had received anything from the lend-lease program.
That and as impressive your are numbers sound, it was a drop in the bucket compared to what the Russians war machine was producing by 1944.
https://www.ww2-weapons.com/russian-arms-production/
We will never know if it was decisive for certain, but at the end of the war the Russians had 20 standing divisions and America had one. Without our help it might have taken the Russians 3-4 years and they would have ended up with 10 divisions instead of 20. We would have had no say in the peace and their never would have been a Bretton Woods Agreement with the dollar as the world currency. A small price for us to pay for what we got out of WWII economically for the next 70 years
The Soviet economy was only able to concentrate on arms production by ignoring food production during the crisis years of the war. They chose guns over butter. The US made sure they didn't starve with Spam and wheat. Ask Russian WWII survivors if they remember Spam.
Another thing: trucks. The Soviets built a lot of tanks and artillery, but the vehicles to tow the guns would have been in short supply. Also, those tens of thousands of Studebaker trucks absence would have made supplying the Red Army a lot harder.
Aviation gasoline, which is high octane fuel - the US supplied the chemicals.
Telephones - the US supplied the poles and the equipment.
Locomotives - US supplied a bunch
Overy - Why the Allies Won is worth a read if you are interested in this.
The Soviets would probably have lost by late 1942 if it weren't for the bulk aid.
Mellenthin's comments in Panzer Battles about seeing some hope in early 1944 with the casualties they were causing wasn't terribly far from the truth. Imagine a Soviet Union that had to minimize replacements to keep farms going to feed its population and trim back production of armored vehicles and artillery to build trucks. Imagine a more effective Luftwaffe and a less effective Red Air Force. Imagine a Red Army with significant supply problems. Then you are imagining a world without Lend-Lease aid.
Why - because Stalin was stupid enough to believe Hitler on the Non-aggression pact - and - when he came within a hairs breath of actually losing the war until Stalingrad - he sacrificed TENS OF MILLIONS OF HIS OWN MEN - in ruthless total war?
Ask the survivors of the Waffen SS who they really feared when crawling out of Russia. It was the women - and grown children - and cossacks - the same brutalized population who visited the same horrors on the French under Bonapart.
The same myth you push here was born of the idiocy that Hitler acted upon when consulting his astrologist to countermand the German High Command when neglecting to take the Caucuses and thus relieve Germany of the dependence - fatal - on Synfuels - while America had 7 of every ten gallons of gasoline for the entire war - start to finish - soup (from the ground) to nuts -( refined) - stateside - away from aerial attack - namely - Hitler's faith that the allies would never defeat Germany because of the race superiority - and the dedication the Hitler Youth engendered to prime the greatest fighting force ever to man a mechanized war.
He was half right. That German Machine - the one that royally screwed up and handed Zhukov the opportunity to open slaughter right into Berlin - was profoundly more disciplined and vicious in its execution of total war.
What the Americans did was VALUE their men and to a much lesser degree literally then - women - but - superior logistics AND brilliant Generalship - and a unique American understanding of total war - war until unconditional surrender - with the secrete sauce - the unleashed power of American innovation and the total war effort on the home front - a story never equaled before or since - where this country was able to go from the dark early days of 1942 until the Bombings of Hiroshima and Naggi.
Not that I would ever expect anyone so smart in so many irrelevant ways to get that - since such a stupid statement only reveals how ignorant you are of relevant history.
Trotsky got his Ice Pick. Nietzsche died broken in an insane asylum. God is not only alive - he has an awesome sense of humor.
Russians are brutal and prone to being mindless sheep-iles - the perfect match for the Bolshevik gangsters that sold them the Atheistic Godless commie crap that stuck in their craw for nearly 100 year run.
They never did anything near 90% - besides slaughter their own - and I suppose the purges Solzhenitsyn documented are somehow subsumed by the great work Howard Zinn left us Jonny Appleseeds?
After seeing what Stalin did in Eastern Europe in the 1940s, no sane person could not take the Soviet threat as seriously as the US did. Was Vietnam a clusterf***-yes, but just about everything else about the Cold War was justified by the knowledge available at the time, imo.
«I was in Czechoslovakia and Hungary in 1974 on a high school student tour, the rural areas were probably little changed from the 1940s, farmers with horse drawn wagons, thatch roofed houses. The cities were dismal, dirty and oppressive.»
That described conditions in 1974 in much of Ireland, Scotland, England, rural France, southern Italy, never mind Greece, Portugal or Spain (or south Korea or China-Taiwan), at the time ruled by USA loving "strong men", and those were the conditions in much of the southern USA too.
Today still those are the conditions in places like Philippines, Indonesia, central and southern America, also ruled by USA loving "strong men", and conditions are reverting to that in much of the USA rust belt and plains.
There is a big difference between being poor because of low levels of development and because of "communism".
The fear of Global Communism is ridiculous, but you will never be able to talk people of a certain age out of continuing to fear this phantasmic monster.
Russia and China are 1-party capitalist states. The USA is a 1-party capitalist state pretending to be a 2-party state. The game is over. Corporate capitalism won.
I feel you, but a lot more than 60,000 lives were wasted in Vietnam.
I think it was something like 500,000 injured and 58K US killed, but some 2 million Vietnamese killed. I don't think that covers others killed in Laos. A huge mess. Rinse, repeat.
Exactly. The French were defeated by the Vietnamese in 1954 at the battle of Dien Bien Phu. The victorious Vietnamese were *led by General Jiap, the *same General that the U.S. faced when *we ended up there ! The French were *expelled from SE Asia as a result of that same battle in 1954.
In return for a successful reinstatement of the French to her former colonies in SE Asia, the U.S. was also guaranteed "preferred" access to the primo Rubber Tree resources of Vietnam. This was back in the days before science had created synthetic rubber, and the *main rubber source of the time was Brazil, where Rubber Tree plantation owners were beginning to realize how much you really could get away with *charging for rubber in a world where all modern militaries everywhere depended upon rubber for Troop Transport !
The French actually asked for B-29 support and nuclear strikes to salvage the Dien Bien Phu situation. Ike turned them down.
That Ike ..... always the Party Pooper ! ;-D ;-D When, as an eighteen-year-old, I ended up in the Navy, I could not understand why I had never learned anything about the geography or even the names of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, etc. When I did some research, I realized that I knew the *area, but it had always been presented to me on the maps in the encyclopedias as simply "French Indochina".
The French liked to call part of the area "Cochin China". That and "Annam" and "Tonkin" would show up on maps occasionally.
Their very name for it "French Indochina" is meaningless in geographical expression, just meaning the land between India and China. But here's where you have to admire the French. They called it a "colony of exploitation", meaning economic exploitation. They refused to lie to themselves about what they were doing.
Gawd ! You're kidding ! Really *do have to give them "props" for honesty, or, at least *gall ! ;-D You are certainly correct about the relative meaninglessness of "Indochina" as a term. I remember hitting up my geography teacher in Sixth Grade because, at the time, I had never heard of the word "Indo". Apparently she hadn't either.
"here's where you have to admire the French"
I guess I have to un-admire the Japanese by the same token. I think "Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere" is a PR meisterwork.
I like how France just continuously fucks everybody's shit up. It's great. Punk rock country, right down to the silly haircuts and uniforms.
What was really crazy was Roger Degueldre and the Armee Secrete in Algieria. The French troops didn’t want to give up the fight-they thought DeGaulle stabbed the Pied Noirs in the back, so they rebelled and basically said “F*** it, it’s on all the way”, and started killing civilians in Algiers and Oran, and attempted multiple assasinations of DeGaulle-The Day of the Jackal was based on these dudes. Degueldre was eventually caught and executed, but France came very close to having a military coup in 1962.
This makes me have even more respect for DeGaulle. To be honest, the guy had balls of steel. He wasn't on our side, but he did the best he could for his own.
Well, except for the Pied Noirs, who he did stab in the back. Reminds me of the old saying "Two wrongs usually generate a third.", if that was an old saying.
Are you kidding me? Have you been to the French War Museum in Paris?
According to the displays, they won WWII single handed and had the energy left after defeating the Nazis and Commies to bail the Americans out too!
Where they scared? Damn right they were scared. Scared they would not be able to save the free world soon enough!
I've heard that it's a mind-boggling example of shameless chauvinism. So...add 'shamelessness' to the list of Franco-virtues.
My French teacher way back when tried to have us understand the French mentality as a declining power and to have some understanding of the lies they tell themselves on that basis.
They can’t make decent music to save their lives tho......
Brutally accurate. But they're great at gangster movies. We can't all be good at everything.
Jean-François Richet - L'instinct de mort & Mesrine: Public Enemy Number One - Vinny Cassel
10 great French gangster films
Pépé le Moko (1937) Director Julien Duvivier. ...
Rififi (1955) Director Jules Dassin. ...
Bob le flambeur (1956) Director Jean-Pierre Melville. ...
The Sicilian Clan (1969) Director Henri Verneuil. ...
Borsalino (1970) Director Jacques Deray. ...
Le Cercle rouge (1970) ...
Max et les Ferrailleurs (1971) ...
The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005)
Still partial to the Swedes - IN ORDER OF DISSAPEARANCE - and my favorite all time Irish IRA British twister - and the Late Bob Hoskins 'mr H' best performance every -
The Long Good Friday (1980)
MESRINE makes me want to throw in Olivier Assayas's CARLOS (2010), even though Carlos is a technically a terrorist and not a gangster.
I really think anything by Assayas qualifies as a gangster movie, in a way. BOARDING GATE (2007)?
"The medieval troubadours are out of date?"
By definition, yes. They are medieval.
So that's what Andorra looks like. I always figured a castle left behind by Charlemagne and a quaint town. It's a tourist trap.
Love it. My ambition in life - after having travelled the world going to every armpit the Army seemingly sends me to, is a lengthy tour of Napoleonic battlefields, walking the Pratzen Heights near Austerlitz, stand on the Landgrafenberg outside Jena, that kind of thing. Despite all my talk about Nazis and Romans, the Napoleonic era remains my fave. But pictures like that you linked send me in another direction, at least on a delicious Medieval detour. I was cursed to be born in a country mostly lacking history. Thanks.
The French have the mother sauces, USA has special sauce.......Mc Donald’s fries 🍟 are still the most universally tasty dish ever created.
They were better when cooked in beef tallow pre-1990.
Please tell me where you have found these legendary clean bathrooms in the USA.
Jesus, that was gutting.
I remember when the Afghan Papers came out near the end of the Trump presidency. A pretty staggering piece of reporting that laid out plainly how little we were accomplishing and at how great a cost. But because both parties have been complicit in the fraud, it was politely ignored after a week or two. We seem to do the same with stories about drug pricing, student debt, law enforcement overreach, and on and on: if the GOP and Dems are in essential lockstep, the story doesn't get mainstream play for long. It doesn't work if "both sides" are villains.
This is the message of a generation.
Every day a person spends in one of the two wings, they lose another IQ point.
You are absolutely right. Your comment reminds me of when I first became aware of a story being "politely ignored after a week or two." That was the Harper's reporting of the the torture-murders at Guantanamo Bay--backed up a by soldier who was stationed there, Joseph Hickman.
Ever since then I've seen things through the lens of how the story is being used by one side against the other, and being swept away if it looks bad for both sides.
Not only fraud, war crimes, weapons trafficking, drug trafficking, human trafficking, etc.....
The uniparty has to be in lock step to protect themselves from justice.
Justice? What the fuck do those child raping goat herders have a right to do undeterred?
If you can’t stand up for defenseless girl children and you still trying to virtue signal the moral high ground.... GTFO
Are you writing this from your bunker outside of Kabul while taking a break from defending young women and little girls from rapists?
He doesn't actually give a shit about them. He just thinks he is taking down SJW types here - not realizing he's firing at phantoms of his own mind. And he's too fucking dumb to figure it out because he's so invested in proving how tough and hard he is.
I think he's a neocon and actually supports the forever wars. Just ask him about womens' rights in a certain occupied territory if you really want to rile him up.
C’mon big balls, all you gots to do to start making it better is to speak out against the goat herders raping little girls as a cultural system.
Exactly. I eagerly await Galleta's first-hand reports of protecting the innocent in Afghanistan. I'm sure he's busy protecting them in Saudi Arabia right now.
Geeezus you limp dicks... let’s see you at least verbalize an acknowledgment that Afghanistan is a shithole culture of women oppressing, child raping, unevolved barbarians.
You ain’t gots to travel all the way over there and take up arms.
Just try and clutch yer balls long enough to verbalize a little support for them you sorry excuses for human beings....
You do realize we can all read you advocating for dropping nukes on those defenseless girls if we scroll down like ten comments, right?
If I was one of them girl children, I would cheer on the destruction of the evil system that rewards them rapists by pearl clutching limp dicks that allow it to continue undeterred
Cool man. We're all proud of you. Have a good afternoon.
Don't provide cover by calling it a "student debt crisis". It's a "college pricing scandal".
Over the last 20 years, as dissemination of all kinds of information has become almost free, college costs have risen almost as fast as medical (and with medical costs, at least we're able to do more for people. No such correlation can be observed with higher education).
That increase in tuition coincides with federal efforts to provide more funding for higher education. I am told by honorable men that this is coincidence (vomits in mouth a little).
The money has gone to dramatically bloat the "administrative layer" of universities, to no observable good effect. Should be a scandal, but all anyone wants to talk about is how to make sure the people who signed up volutarily to take on those debts don't have to pay them back. It's not fair that they should be so burdened, when, like war costs, the money can just be stolen from workers.
I'd say "hard-working taxpayers" but some of you seem to hate the group when identified that way.
Anyway, blahdeblah women most affected, and other 'disadvantaged groups'..
The Afghan papers only confirmed what I already believed and were in line with history. Where Empires go to die.
It's like conquering Antarctica. You get nothing, at very great cost.
I was in the military during this period, although I had a cushy job compared to Mr. Bonenberger.
It's hard for non-military people to imagine what a bubble of thinking the military creates for its members. While I was in I thought Afghanistan and Iraq made sense. It took a few years of being out of that culture to realize what a horrendous mistake it was. I suppose it's what veterans of every war go through. I two used the "where helping the women and children" rationalization. I'm surprised how many people still cling to that despite all the evidence showing what bullshit it is.
The war was not just a disaster for Afghanistan and the US military, but for the US domestic population as well. Before 9/11 people in my town would openly express doubts about their government. After 9/11 people started speaking in hushed tones out of fear they would be overheard my fellow citizens or their government. I trace the culture of fear that now defines America to that. Not only did we accomplish nothing but waste a lot of money and human lives in Afghanistan, but we surrendered our rights at home under the Patriot Act and turned our domestic police force into an occupying Army with surplus weapons from the war machine through the 1033 transfers. We raised an entire generation of cops who function more like the Israeli security force than a domestic organization here to maintain the peace and order. I first witnessed what our police had become in Ferguson, MO in 2014, but it all goes back to the war.
I have a lot of sympathy for Mr. Bonenberger. It sucks when you give your life to a cause you believe in that only later you learn was a big lie actually made your country worse. He mentions Bin Laden as a cause of the war, who was still alive when I got out. I remember telling my friends when I left they needed to get that guy. It's tragic to admit now that Bin Laden accomplished all of his goals with 3 planes. He won the war by a long shot and would be proud of what he did not make this country what it has become.
Bin Laden called our bluff, the façade of our commitment to liberty. As soon as we are challenged in our comfortable lives, we turn into authoritarian, near totalitarian assholes. First drugs, then terrorism, then COVID, now "domestic white supremacist insurrectionists".
You could even add Communists & Super Predators (and prob quite a few others), IMO. To me it’s a long-running streak of obsessive hysterical idiots crying aloud, “we have to do SOMETHING!” the population going along with it, only to realize years/decades later that that “Something” was horrific and made the world a worse place than it was before.
Seems to be the theme of the 21st Century, where the phrase, “the cure is worse than the disease” has lost all meaning.
You might go all the way back to Johnson's "War on Poverty". Such a noble goal, and it enriched a whole shitload of DC apparatchick, bureaucrats and higher-level "think tank" types. Also seems to have largely achieved Pres Johnson's OTHER noble goal..."We'll have those ni**ers voting Democrat for a hundred years." But little enough actual help for the impoverished.
That's why I LITERALLY feel nauseous when I hear the smarmy, obsequious language that pours out of "well-meaning" politicians, whose goals are always noble, and whose results are always the same.
Exactly-France would not have been speaking German forever w/out US intervention, but they would have been speaking Russian by 1946......Stalin would have repeated what the Imperial army did in 1815, but w/out the niceties........
Beating the Nazis was important and stopping Stalin as well. But that is pretty much the last American foreign policy success. So time to change strategy, I would say.
I am not positive that leaving the Nazis alone wouldn't have resulted in something analogous to what we have today. Europe still has a tiny Jewish population that is hated. It's unified like the Nazis wanted to do. In the process of getting rid of the Nazis, the British Empire was destroyed as was the French analogue, and 45 years of Iron Curtain Bolshevism was put upon the countries of Eastern Europe. The Germans might have lost in the East, or they would have more likely come to some accord with the Soviets somewhere east of where the communist border ended up after WWII.
It's an intriguing thought. The Nazis mostly completed their annihilation of the Jews during WWII, there was not much more to do. Probably no Israel to roil the Mideast. True, Jews would have suffered more. Balance that out against millions who wouldn't have been killed, and those tens of millions moved around Eastern Europe postwar in ethnic cleansings with high casualties.
I fail to see how this would have been much worse than what happened otherwise.
In hindsight, the US could have dropped an atomic bomb on Hitler's head in 1945 and saved itself a lot of trouble.
I believe that was the intent, or something like that. He shot himself before it was ready.
Almost all alternative history follows a path of convergence to our world's defaults ultimately. I believe most historians believe that the events of our reality were largely fated and caused by large scale forces that essentially mandated them, so any historical futzing with the past will just be a blip and will ultimately come back to "normal".
As for what would have happened to Hitler, he wasn't destined to live forever. I would envision him being supplanted at some point by another Nazi luminary, even if he didn't make it easy by kicking the bucket. We know Stalin wasn't destined to survive the war by long. Absent those two, the nations they led were not quite as murderous. A war would have looked less and less desirable. That said, I'm not entirely certain the Soviet Union would have survived any longer. The historical forces operating against large-scale communism were and are strong.
I am pretty certain that Red China would have had a harder go of it. 1949 may not have happened the way it did. It is possible the US could have completely avoided war with Japan. So many unknowables.
About the only thing I can be sure of is that there is no guarantee that our efforts against the Nazis were actually worth it in the long run.
The question of who would have become the global hegemon in the absence of the US on the world stage is unanswered. Or, if the US took up the role, when?
I was mainly talking about the latter half of the 20th Century & what’s unfolded in the 21st Century so far, where tools of control & oppression have become vastly more sophisticated & robust.
I think your example (WW2) highlights how necessary this aversion to panics (moral/political/economic) was to *Germans* when they gave the keys to the kingdom to a genocidal psychopath out of their frustration/fear. I don’t think it’s for anybody to proclaim what kind of world we’d be in if WW2 went differently but I will say that I’m young enough (and most people are too) that I’ve never known what the world is like without nuclear weapons, and that honestly bums me out.
1) Demand the abdication of the Kaiser, and have a reparations penalty that is very large and politically unpopular, along with a war guilt clause in the peace treaty. Every time a tax increase is proposed, you will be accused of using it to pay the shitty French.
2) Have a replacement ineffectual parliamentary government with strongly represented far right and far left wing parties, with a doddering, senile President (named Hindenburg) who does as little as he can.
3) Have one of the right wing leaders discover early in his career (1923) that he would have to pretend to be conciliatory to liberal interests to get into power. After he tries his version of the Mussolini "March on Rome"
4) Have a depression that shoots up the electoral power of the populist, sneaky party to about 43% across Germany due to unemployment and the above.
5) Have a succession of two ineffectual Chancellors that are unable to do anything to relieve the economic pressure, and refuse to include your 43% in any coalition that doesn't include you as Chancellor
6) Get appointed Chancellor after they exhaust all other possibilities.
7) Have a Reichstag Fire happen/provoked, then suspend all the Communists, giving the Chancellor and his coalition partners a supermajority in the Reichstag (assembly)
8) Vote in an Enabling Act giving the Chancellor the power to rule by decree, obviating legislation, due to the national emergency
I'd like to know where in that eight point program, the German public was supposed to do something differently, given the circumstances. If the Nazis hadn't done it, the Communists might well have.
"Have a replacement ineffectual parliamentary government with strongly represented far right and far left wing parties, with a doddering, senile President ... who does as little as he can."
This seems eerily familiar... contemporary, even. I just can't quite place it.
"I’ve never known what the world is like without nuclear weapons, and that honestly bums me out."
Anybody younger than about 75 doesn't know either.
There's only one country that has ever gotten nuked. Ask the Japanese how they feel about it.
(P.S. I sympathize with your comment.)
Nuclear weapons have a big advantage in that national leaders have a lot of skin in the game now when it comes to war. So far, that has worked out to the public's advantage.
I visited Tokyo in mid August of 2002, and my American buddy and his Japanese fiancée and I were eating lunch at a swanky joint in the Ginza district-Japanese version of Upper East Side in Manhattan-on the 8th floor. We hear a commotion outside and see a bunch of dudes waving placated jumping out of vans with rising suns and writing on them.
“What’s their deal?”, I ask. “Emperor worshippers. Right wingers” replies his fiancé. “Why are they mad today?” “You oughta know, you’re the history teacher” my buddy replied. It was the anniversary of either Hiroshima or Nagasaki or the Emperor’s informal radio surrender!
The Germans were done on the Eastern Front in early 1943 with what for them was the disaster of Stalingrad. That disproved to themselves and their enemies the myth of their invincibility. The Russians could, and did, take hideous casualties and yet they killed more Germans (about 4 times more) than the rest of the Allies combined. Now, we did supply the Soviets with a lot of materiel, but they provided the bodies and the sheer will.
The first US action against German forces (roughly contemporaneous to Stalingrad) was a disaster for us. By the time of D-Day, the Germans had been on the defensive, and losing ground, in the east for more than a year.
The German decision to declare war on the U.S. was inexplicable, as they had no real solidarity with the Japanese (this is hilariously demonstrated by the non-aggression pacts the Soviets signed with each at different times - both of which undercut the other side of the Axis pact). Absent that act, the U.S. would've been hard pressed to justify entering the European theater.
The antidrug thing was from the 80s on. Interesting that we had two domestic terrorist attacks in the 90s and failed to lose our heads over them. I'm loath to give Clinton credit, but maybe focusing on getting a hummer from interns in the Oval Office is better than forever war.
Disagree. We should have taken the terrorists more seriously. That doesn’t mean sitting in a country for 20 years
I was an advocate of nuking Afghanistan border to border in 2001.
I was an advocate of nuking Bin Laden in 1998 when Clinton sent conventional cruise missiles.
The "Lake Kabul" strategy, as made famous on Cape May boardwalk tee-shirts...
I remember the Kabul weather report memes-6,000 degrees farenheit with crushing atmospheric pressure.
I think there was a moral panic over "human trafficking" in there as well, but a very good point.
The moral panic over "human trafficking" serves best as an example of how these moral panics are used.
1) Find something so horrible everyone can agree on it. (forced sexual enslavement)
2) Use certain words or a particular term, to describe it.
3) Shovel in less severe examples of the thing (in this case "pimped out prostitution), then apply it to things vaguely similar (party girls, escorts, call girls, high-level grifter/models, etc), then apply it to things that are actually a stretch (camwhores, eGirls, OnlyFans)
4) All actions taken against ANY of these things will be described by the term we use to describe the kidnapping and enslavement into horrible conditions of young women. (ref: campaign against Backpages.com.
5)
6) Profit! (in this case, political capital, increased police budgets, etc.)
For further examples of this particular abuse of language, see: "discrimination", "drug abuse", "toxic <fill in the blank>
Pretty good. I'd only add:
4.5: Apply vaguely written pre-internet laws to new technology (the internet) to shrink the definition of prostitution, circumvent the Constitution and expand the definition of pimping and human trafficking beyond all recognition while using that as a platform to talk about the kind of horrendous cases you never actually find.
For the hoity-toity inclined:
http://onlineresearchjournals.com/aajoss/art/151.pdf
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10624-015-9366-5
Well done. That's exactly the tactic. And the tactic is dishonest even though there DO exist "horror story" examples.
I guess that could've been 5) but homage to the Underpants Gnomes...
A point Cohen made in his 1972 paper on Moral Panics is that most moral panics involve a seed of truth that has nothing to do with the solutions that are proposed.
There are a tiny number of horrendous sex slavery horror stories and we have a pretty good idea where we can find them, (the failed foster care system, etc) but the current criminalization model is specifically designed to ignore the real victims and focus on consenting adults.
Almost all the people I see in the news these days that fit the classic stereotype of the gun wielding violent pimp also wear a blue clown suit for a living and travel with qualified impunity.
Plus "Elian Gonzales"
Freedom is a fragile gift that must be protected and fought for. Freedom is a historical anomaly
Very well said!!
Of course the power and greed of the military industrial/surveillance complex looms large in the background, sometimes foreground of all of it.
"[Bin Laden] won the war by a long shot and would be proud of what he did [to] make this country what it has become."
I fear this is the painful, inescapable truth of the "War on Terror."
Technically four planes but your point is made.
While I think those who died in PA were heroes, I would argue that to their credit they did little to further his cause.
They all died. Increased the terror level, which was his objective.
I guess it's up for debate. With no footage it's hard to predict the impact United 93 had on creating more terror.
I chose 3, but sure, let's make it 4. As you alluded to, hardly the point.
On the 5th anniversary of 9/11 we went to Shanksville. Stayed in Somerset the night before, and very early morning we went to a diner near the motel for breakfast so we could get to the memorial for sunrise. Some of the locals we talked to told us they heard that a jet had been seen in the area of the plane before it crashed --- suggesting that maybe it had been shot down? If that had been necessary, I told them, I didn't think our government was competent enough to have done it. They pretty much agreed. The courage of the Flight 93 folk still overwhelms.
Yes it does. Thanks for sharing the personal story.
Bin Laden is said not to have expected to score 3 direct hits,things went “better” than he anticipated.
His thought patterns were just what I would expect an engineer to think. 2/4 would have been what I would have expected. Security luck, heroes, engine troubles, his own people chickening out - all were considerations. Also, if we had been lucky enough to catch one early, it might have caused all of them to fail.
If we don’t get out of Afghanistan and Iraq soon I suggest we model our military command structure after King Richard The Lion-heart’s crusade’s command structure. All of the members in the executive and legislative branches of government, and their family members, need to be relocated to the battlefields so they can lead by example. Liz Cheney, dust off your combat boots honey.
Just imagine if, after 9/11, G W had, as opposed to demonstrating his tuffness [sic] by sending in the US military to Afghanistan and Iraq, clamped down on the inflow of non citizens coming into the country. Just impose some serious vetting on those wanting to come in and we probably would have been more secure than we have been since 9/11. But who would have done the work we don’t want to do, for minimum wage; right?
GW Bush, what a joke!
One aspect of Trump Derangement Syndrome that pisses me off the most is the rehabilitation of GWB among my friends who are Democrats. They began speaking fondly of the Bush Admin because they found Trump to be so horrible. Forget about all the death and destruction.
Hell no. The Bush Admin may have been the worst in modern US history. There is no level of apologetics that can make me long for the days of that particular gang of criminals.
And yet even GWB wouldn't murder-drone foreigners, let alone US citizens, like his successor, the Nobel-peace-prize winner.
I don’t know, they are now so tight GW & BO were recently seen in the backyard of BO’s Martha’s Vineyard mansion with a caliper trying to figure out how long they have before the sea covers the first floor and BO has to buy a bucket so the servants can start bailing.
I'm sure W is showing all of his appreciation that O was kind enough not to start an investigation into the 'errors' of the preceding administration. So of course he wouldn't criticize his successor about his own misdeeds.
GWB and BO are two assholes, (Michelle loves them both), but that home on MV is 10 feet above seal level(I've seen the contour maps) and in no danger of any threatened sea level rise during his lifetime, unlike the Trump golf course in Ireland, where he petitioned and was granted the right to build a sea wall to protect three ocean front holes, needed, as the petition claimed, because of the rise of oceans due to global climate change.
Are you one of those who think “global” climate was static until the SUV hit the road?
Also, related to another of your post, just because the Bush family and their amigos on the left claim they are conservative, it in no way means they are. There is nothing conservative about the way they wasted taxpayer’s money; and for that matter, American lives.
Since when have American conservatives been conservative with wasting taxpayer money? From Reagan on down, the only time deficits meant anything to them was when they weren't in power, "Deficits don't matter" Dick Cheney, and "Deficits are only numbers" Tom Delay. As for wasting American lives in pointless wars, which wars have conservatives been against? As a Vietnam vet and a Cold War child, the conservative cry was always about Dems losing one country after another to the communists and not being tough enough. War is bipartisan in this country, but to try and let the conservatives off the hook is intellectually dishonest.
As for "amigos on the left", the Obama/Clinton/Schumer/Pelosi clan is not even remotely left, other than on purely performative virtue signaling performances. On all substantive issues, they are solidly corporatist economically and American exceptionalist on foreign policy.
As for man's influence on climate change, I leave you with Exxon's own scientists' report of over 40 years ago citing the link between fossil fuels consumption and climate change.
Obama , of course, is a hypocrite, as is Trump, but his home is nowhere near being endangered by climate change, a falsehood I've seen promoted all over the internet, when all one has to do is look for the facts, as I did, and see his home is safe well past his worthless lifetime.
I shed no tears or Constitutional outrage for Aw-Alaki, but the drone war in Waziristan/Afghanistan is basically kids playing Space Invaders on real people w/ no on the ground intel, justification, or moral inventory by the trigger pullers.
I do shed Constitutional outrage.
Either being a U.S. citizen and due process of law means something or it doesn't. "The law" is essentially a game of make-believe in which most of us willingly choose to participate. It's true that the concept in itself invites mockery, but I really don't like it when it's selectively violated with no repercussions because the violator is a powerful government official. That's where we're at now.
Not to get too hyperventilated and melodramatic, but in 2011 it was al-Awlaki; tomorrow it could be me or you, depending upon how inconvenient to the regime our stated beliefs may be.
I thought Abe Lincoln and US Grant settled the question of killing US citizens engaged in treasonous/terrorist activity back in the 1860s. Native Americans have a much greater claim for moral outrage on this issue than anyone-they weren’t legally recognized as citizens until the 1920s!
That depends upon your view of whether or not speech can be considered "treasonous/terrorist activity." I'm don't know who al-Awlaki shot or blew up, if anyone. He -- and two of his children 16, and 8, also U.S. citizens -- were killed by the U.S. Government. I'm not sure what "treasonous/terrorist activity" 16- and 8-year olds are capable of getting up to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdulrahman_al-Awlaki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Nawar_al-Awlaki
I take your point as it stands, but even today many U.S. Southerners take a dim view of Lincoln and Grant, much as many Native Americans take a dim view of the U.S. Government in general -- in my opinion, not without justification. I don't think these questions have quite been "settled" yet.
Real life Ender's Game.
I should probably read that one of these months, heard good things about it.
Certainly. Definitely did not intend my comment to be an exoneration of subsequent administrations.
You can't possibly be THAT uninformed.
Bush did drone kill civilians, but unlike Oshama, did not extend that to US citizens. Basically, Obama, (and Trump, even more so) fought these wars from the sky and with fewer troops on the ground, due to cost and casualty considerations. Bush, like a true conservative, had no qualms blowing large amounts of cash on the military with his boots on the ground approach.
Of course, as events have proven, all the different strategies failed, though we can take comfort that we inflicted far more casualties than we suffered, as we contemplate yet another military defeat for the world's greatest military.
Yes, I'm sure that was due to either his moral decency or the fact that he didn't have that technology available back then. One or the other.
So true
Your friends who do this never had any real moral convictions or philosophical problems with W. They were just repeating their programming, just as they are doing now. What you are noticing is just how few people are actually free thinkers..
Sad but true.
American's love ex-presidents. I remember at President Ford's funeral people in the media were talking about what a strong leader he had been. Like him or hate him, no one would have described the Ford Administration as "strong." They even had Chevy Chase out there apologizing for his SNL skits from that time.
All presidents are monsters. No one with a moral compass would take the job.
Ford was a great Prez!! Thanks to him I never had to register for the draft. He da man! ⛳️
I once named Ford as my favorite president and got challenged on it. "How could you say that simple-minded used car salesman could be the best?"
"He did the least damage."
You can flip that too - the total and abject worship by the republicans and the right during Dubya's presidency has now turned into a good Mormon shunning. Why was he great then but bad now?
Oh, absolutely. But I think it's a bit more understandable for the "I supported him at the time the but he's bad now" folks, because a lot of people were hoodwinked at the time into believing the whole fake WMD story. Most people now should know better now to question what they read in the press. But yes, I absolutely agree with you that many on both sides are just following the herd.
Americans bought into the fake link between Iraq and 9-11 and the attendant WMD fiasco because the Bush administration cleverly and deliberately used existing bigotry towards Muslims in general and Arabs in particular to make a connection when anyone remotely interested could have found out that not only were bin Laden and Saddam Hussein not allies, but were blood enemies. When Hussein invaded Kuwait, bin Laden requested permission from the Saudis to use his forces to fight the Iraqis rather than the Americans. I'd like to have $5 for every time I've heard someone here say we should turn the entire ME into a parking lot and take their oil whenever we suffered some terrorist attack, even after the Oklahoma City bombing.
I'm so tired of the intellectually lazy trend to blame everything on racism. Yes, the flames of nationalism were stoked after 9/11, and neocons exploited that sentiment as much as they could. The fact is that most US citizens couldn't tell you the difference between Iraq and Afghanistan let alone point to where those countries are on a map. But somehow these same people and their bigotry are responsible for what happened? Why do lower classes who did less of the thinking and most of the bleeding get smeared with the racism charge? Why do Bush, Pelosi, Hillary and the media get a pass? The media should have laughed Bush out of the white house when he tried to connect Hussein to Bin-Laden. But they didn't. They get to have their cake and eat it too, blaming the public when things go wrong.
Fuckin A
I will NEVER speak fondly of W The Worst. He sent close to a million people to their deaths for no fucking reason. Just the sight of him pimping his new book this week made me livid.
At the risk of reinforcing epierce labeling me as a Zionist....
W changed the entire narrative about suicide attacks for the glory of their sky god.
Prior to 9/11 with the targets of Islamic terrorism and violence being the Jews of Israel it was mostly shrugged off.
Talk about your low expectations, George Clooney and friends, CNN and crew, in fact all of Europe, Canada and the (former) British colonies can not seem to express expectations that the Islamic world evolve past barbaric, unevolved, oppressive, violent, intimidating, 1200 year old rules for life.
Great news homos.... the ‘tards negotiated your Muslim existence down to life in prison and death by honor killing.
oh, bullshit. There was never any narrative in the US news media or popular attitudes that viewed suicide attacks as anything but the most grotesque desperation. They certainly didn't move the needle in favor of sympathy for the Palestinians.
It was seen as Israel's problem, because it was happening in Israel. But the first militant resistance group to rely on suicide bombing as an explicit terror tactic in the modern era were Tamil Tigers, in Sri Lanka. https://aoav.org.uk/2018/suicide-terrorism-in-the-sri-lankan-civil-war-1983-2009/
That didn't even merit a line in the news for most Americans of the era. And if it had, it would be seen as a Sri Lanka problem.
It sounds to me as if you expect the US to "pacify" the Middle East on behalf of Israel, by force of arms. The PNAC project.
No.
Not really, I am reflecting the truth as I watched it unfold.
Your view of desperation does not comport to the reality to me. We had plenty of warning about the intractable, violent, unevolved ideaology underlying Muslim countries in the world.
Being martyred pays off bigly to their view. In the case of Palestinians in the form of afterlife virgins they get to rape and for their families a monetary bounty from state sponsors of terror.
The door was opened for them many times. They refused to walk through it. The goal is the destruction of the Jewish state and the subsuming of Israeli Jews in a larger Muslim state. All of the arguments proffered are just window dressing.
It isn't that simple; Palestinian resistance to the nation-state of Israel has never been exclusively Muslim, and it pre-dates the influence of Islamists that predominates today.
I think you have valid points. But the critics of Israeli policy have valid points, too. If the leaders of Israel are interested in de-escalating the risk of the nation being attacked, they need to put their nuclear arms program on the table for inspection and negotiation. It just isn't a good look to be so dishonest as to continue with official denials of its existence. Israel has had atomic weapons for decades (while refusing to admit to their existence.) That only provides rationalization- and a scrim of justification- for the leaders of Iran to continue with their own atomic weapons and ballistic missile programs.
The leaders of Israel have also pursued other policies that have amounted to writing off the Arab street and Arab youth wholesale, in a region where half of the population is under the age of 22 (up from the late teens, at the beginning of this century.) Ham-handed antagonism and the pursuit of or endorsement of militarist geopolitical interventions aren't a sustainable position for Israel's peace and security. That's the only face of Israel and the West that these kids have seen in this century, and it's little wonder that so many of them are easy marks for the Jew-hating propaganda of the Islamists. There ought to be a better way to make use of the Internet age and modernity than whinging about the opportunities it provides for Islamist propaganda, and trying to restrict the Internet. That's just more of same old obsession with Power and Control. In that regard, the cyber-effort in the West that helped generate the Arab Spring was a new technology put to stale purposes. Those are 21st century features that could easily out-compete ISIS recruiting, if only they organic, decentralized efforts were directed at expanding the minds of the youth, by youth, for youth, rather than being subordinated to the paltry short-term geopolitical goals of their elders, such as being directed toward destabilization and regime change.
It's extraordinarily difficult to counsel moderation on this topic to either Zionists or anti-Zionists; I know of no other topic that's as likely to transform people of both opposing sides who are clearly highly educated and intelligent into, like, demented werewolves trying to out-paranoid each other. The worrisome thing is that the extremists are presently the people driving the policy on both sides of the conflict, and the rest of us have to share a planet with them.
A few years ago, I read a long-form Sunday edition of the comic strip Candorville, by Darrin Bell, that summed up my current position on the issue better than anything else I've ever read. I wish I had clipped it out and saved it.
Democrats only issue hall passes. They don’t issue permanent passes to the opposition. It’s all situational. W will be the bad guy again, soon enough. The democrats just need a little time to process Biden pulling the troops out, then they will turn on W so fast and furious for us being there, people will get dizzy from the spinning.
Nonsense. You're twisting history for the purpose of partisan propaganda. Probably based on the fingernail-deep erudition provided by the Limbaugh era of Hot Talk Radio, along with post-1990 TV news media, and the (mostly ghostwritten) books from the "thought leaders" elevated to Electronic Media stardom by those charades.
Read some actual deep history, for crying out loud- Partners In Power, by Roger Morris. The fearless historical inventories done by Kevin Phillips, beginning with The Politics of Rich and Poor. Look at the level of educational attainment, the career background, and the research and writing abilities of both of those guys, and it should be clear that the only thing that accounts for their decades-long status of Cancellation by nearly every American news media outlet is that they tell too much of the truth. Kevin Phillips might have gotten a handful of appearances on TV news shows upon the publication of his books like Bush Dynasty and American Theocracy- but he was quickly disappeared. Meanwhile, Roger Morris was practically made a nonperson as far as being provided airtime for his views. Morris' offense was saying many of the same things that Matt Taibbi is now saying. Twenty-five years ago.
An investigative research project I'd like to see: compare the total amount of airtime Kevin Phillips has received over the past 30 years, with the amount provided to David Gergen by CNN alone. Or by MSNBC alone.
(I also find it interesting that both the avowedly Left-leaning FAIR and the avowedly Right-leaning National Review disdain Phillips and Gergen, with FAIR putting them in the same "Beltway Establishment Republican" pigeonhole, and NR portraying them both as faux conservatives with similar liberal-massaging views...I can't say which misreading is worse. Both of those interpretations are dreadful oversimplifications. I mean, take off those ideological blinders and set aside a few hours to engage with the content of their work. Admittedly, in Gergen's case it won't take nearly that long. But Phillips was speaking out about the threat from the increasing income equality that he was noticing- and documenting- 30 years ago. And I haven't heard anybody inviting him into provide context to that discussion, which only became a hot media topic after the bottom fell out of the home mortgage market in 2008. I was noticing increasing income inequality up close and personal in 1991, the same year that The Politics of Rich and Poor was published. And to hear people twist that decades-long process into some contrast between Obama vs. Trump...how old are you, twelve?)
Beyond the fact that there's long been an unspoken agreement between the two party establishments about refraining from investigating the misdeeds of previous administrations, Bill Clinton was downright close to the late George H. W. Bush. Arkansas Governor Clinton had no reluctance to offer his state as a staging base for the Contra effort directed by Bush during the Reagan administration.
Jimmy Carter got more of a cold shoulder from his own party than has been given to any Republican President- up until the era of Donald Trump, the skunk who showed up at the Beltway Establishment's garden party.
On the other hand, the Bush’s have given gravitas to the greedy, graspy, how gauche it girl Hill and her rapist husband.
Nothing screams high class individual like having the secret service return antiques you stole from the White House.
There's been a lot of hypocritical flip flopping among people here. Among libs, only two I know continued to go to anti war rallies during the Obama years, these people now being, as you say, fans of the man they once hated, while among the people I know who voted for Trump, nearly all were strongly pro Bush and pro war back in the day, but pretend now to be the only true anti war faction.
Partisanship is a sad thing to contemplate.
Absolutely, more evidence of their inability to think, and to do so rationally.
We should go one step further and make sure that the children of the top 5% be drafted first for all wars. If we go to war with Syria we'll clear our Harvard and Yale to do it. Women too! Can't be sexist! Send them all to the front line. Let the elite show their "patriotism".
Hell, I would be happy if the Generals Admirals would show up to the war zone for something other than a tax break.
In the civil war over 200 generals were killed:
https://theworldsmilitaryhistory.wikia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Army_General_Officers_who_have_died_while_on_Active_Duty#Civil_War_.281861_-_1865.29
By WWII it was 23
https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/senator-plans-amendment-to-end-transfer-of-military-equipment-to-local-police-as-militarization-of-cops-on-full-display/
In Afghanistan and Iraq (our longest war in US history) it's been 1.
https://abcnews.go.com/International/us-general-slain-afghanistan-identified-maj-gen-harold/story?id=24843479
Even within the military, those who give the orders to kill have less and less skin in the game.
U.S. Central Command- the top level of administrative command for the Invasion and Occupation of both Iraq and Afghanistan is located at MacDill Air Force Base, on the coast of scenic Tampa Bay, Florida.
https://www.centcom.mil/ABOUT-US/COMPONENT-COMMANDS/
That's a bit of knowledge that I first gleaned from an aside by General Tommy Franks, at one of his televised press conferences.
UNCENTCOM is tasked with the duty of U.S. military "power projection" in the region stretching in an arc from Egypt eastward to Pakistan.
https://www.centcom.mil/AREA-OF-RESPONSIBILITY/Qatar/
USCENTCOM HQ at MacDill AFB is around 7660 or so miles from the CENTCOM branch office at Doha, Qatar. Only about 80 miles from Disney World, though.
Still, though. Closer than San Fran or Dallas. Bet those muzzies couldn't even HEAR a saber rattle from, say, Chicago.
The AFRICOM HQ basing debacle was hilarious. No African nation would host it, perhaps not wanting to be COM'd. So it's in Stuttgart.
Proving that, in Africa at least, hookers and bar owners don't have much lobbying power.
And Harold Greene was a decent guy, too. I had met him.
Oh so true. And since they are obviously much smarter than the average low life types in the military, they should be able to go in, create a stable Afghanistan and Iraq and still be home in time for the Hi-light of every year, the Harvard/Yale rivalry football game.
Great idea!
It's not that they would be any more effective, it's that they'd be willing to sacrifice themselves or their own children for profit, instead of someone elses. There would be much, much less war.
Not so sure of that. I mean, have you *met* the children of the 1%?
Draft women just as soon as women's reproductive rights are 100% secure in all 50 states, equal work gets equal pay and all deadbeat dads have paid up in full. Until then, hell NO!
I thought not all women had wombs. Your exclusion of them is problematic.
Beau served. That was a tradition at one time. The kids of politicians enlisted. They might not have been on the front line, but they were part of the story. Can’t say it is true with now, but it was common of people in Biden’s generation.
So did Hunter! He was Honorably Discharged if I recall correctly!
No. He was discharged. Not an honorable discharge and not a court martial. His records show he was discharged because of drug use.
There's a commonly used level called a General Discharge. Neither an "honorable" or a "dishonorable." Often used when separating someone from service for minor infractions.
I'm asking this because I don't know how the military works. Is it common to get a general discharge for drug use? For some reason I always thought that results in a dishonorable discharge.
I’m assuming you are joking
Princess Cheney would counter that she already works on the front lines now. But since other residents lacked the courage to stay the course, Potomac Green Zone took its fencing down last month
Or we could allow voters more control over the budget.
They wouldn't come if no one hired them. But we can't be putting old white dudes in prison for hiring them now can we ??
Oh, they don’t come expecting government handouts, I forgot.
Keep perpetuating the lie if you have to but the cause of all this immigration is US foreign policy.
So hilarious how faux news owns the conservative narrative to this day.
This coming from the “corporations don’t pay taxes” parrot. Thanks for yet another chortle.
They just charge the consumer so that means the consumer pays the taxes for them.
Are you getting derpier? OF COURSE they have to raise prices to cover the cost of paying taxes. What does that matter if the taxes are paid and the government has the money? What the fuck are you even saying? That "the corporation" doesn't feel the "pain" of losing that money? Does that frustrate you? Would you like to stick a long needle into the corporations' leg? Do you fantasize about "hurting" the corporation? Do you think it would be better if government took all the corporations' money and then strangled it? What is wrong with you?
War has always and will always be a racket. This is yet another example of why we shouldn't allow other people to choose our friends or enemies for us. The "war on terror" in reality is a war of terror waged on the peasants by the so called elites
When you suck at leading you rely upon these sorts of tactics to make up for your lack of talent.
The reason we have the police state we currently live in is due to the war criminals within our governments and the people who own them trying to avoid justice for their crimes.
We're not being protected from anything, the elite are being protected from us.
Not until we see a war crimes tribunal, some trials, and some sentencing not corrupted by money will the human race be able to advance beyond its current dualistic ideology that keeps it so deluded that we keep falling for these bullshit us vs them fairy tales that get made up to justify the whims of yet another trust fund baby or "royal" family within the empire.
Until the war crimes trials happen things will just continue to get more brutal and cartoonish, divisive and hypocritical.
I feel so badly for these kids who got duped into this disaster as well as all the other empirical forever war "investments" that the kleptocracy has and is creating.
Smedley Butler called this shit out for what it was decades ago.
The racket is now considered normal.
The tyranny Athens imposed on others it finally imposed on itself. Thucydides
Lust of conquest had long ago done its work; trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.
Mark Twain
US foreign policy finally got converted into domestic policy with the AUMF.
They can kill any one of us without due process at any time right here in the US if they so choose.
Anyone who quotes Thucydides is my hero. Long live Oceania!
I'll save my encomia for someone who quotes Thucydides AND Mark Twain.
Well, lookee there...
How about them Afghan girls living lives of servitude, rape and misery? Does that make yer limp dick twitch Skutch? You think it’s a higher callin to respect them goat herders right to rape than having YT try to improve it.
What the fuck is wrong with you tards? If’s you big balled, super smart, testosterone driven geniuses can’t place a girls wellbeing above those Afghans right to live undeterred you another big ole organic sack of a waste of balls and testosterone.
So are you ret-conning a whole new rationale for our being there - as a military force for feminism? Since you are so spun up for it - tell us all about your service record. Or did you join up as a merc to go do good?
"We have always been at war with Eastpatriarchia"
I am saying the world’s girl children turn their hopeless eyes to... a bunch of limp dicks, buying into revisionist history about the greatest liberal social contracts ever being the actual scourge.
It ain’t the struggle with what to do about it I object to, it’s the limp dicked virtue signaling
Just grow yer man bun out and call yerself Russel Brand then....
You're going to liberate people by blowing them up?
::::looking through my desk for the launch codes:::::
Nope. I just can’t stand the limp dicks virtue signaling when they don’t have the balls to argue against the barbarism of Islam much less risk their own comfort to aid helpless girl children
You were going to tell us about how much you have done, right? Other than being a keyboard warrior.
Why aren't you in uniform then ? Nothing like a total hypocritical limp dick calling everyone else a limp dick and using neocon talking points to do it.
Alright - you're yelling at clouds, got it. Do that a bit myself from time to time.
I like to stand on the corner and direct top-volume jeremiad at the traffic. Figuring my odds of addressing at least one appropriate target are pretty good.
How about them Saudi girls getting the same treatment ? You're using Bush admin talking points to bolster imperialism. Go grab a fucking uniform and go defend them if you actually care that much.
God, but you're such an asshole today.
Just go take a walk or something.
Eat shit. Out yer ass. With a spoon.
What is wrong with you? Stay out of the comments section if you have nothing valuable to say. And seriously change your writing to leave out your low class vocabulary.
Eat shit asswipe. Out yer asshole. With some grey poupon
Too bad you didn't tell either Carter or Reagan that when they decided to arm the Afghan rebels in their ultimately successful overthrow of the socialist government in that country, a government that strongly advanced the role of women in that country. Sometimes the plans we make come back to bite us in the ass, but I suppose you knew all that and strongly opposed the "Afghan freedom fighters" who were all the rage back in the day when they were willing canon fodder for the US as we played the great game. By the way, are these Afghan women the same ones we've been blowing up in various mud huts, hospitals, wedding parties and various other locations?
Still there's nothing I'm aware of keeping you from taking your 2nd Amendment implements over there, and with Little Miss Lindsey Graham, fighting to the death for the Afghan women you now care so much about. If you do go, feel free to ask for advice on being in combat; it's been awhile, but I still remember most of what I learned in Vietnam.
Nice try to suck your own dick but it too widdle and too wimp
«How about them Afghan girls living lives of servitude, rape and misery?»
So the next on the list of countries to invade and liberate must be Saudi Arabia and Kuwait! :-)
Fun fact: at 20% of a population being Muslim, violence, intimidation murder and mahem result.
I am pretty sure we are past the “liberation” myth.
Containment. Options are limited once one accepts that evolving is not on the table.
I served during the Vietnam debacle; after which, for a short time I actually believed the U.S. could never make so ridiculous a mistake again. Then I realized the only thing about Vietnam that the imperial war machine considered to be a mistake was that public sentiment forced an end to the "game". Were it not for the millions upon millions of deaths, casualties and lives ruined by the insanity that is us (e.g., the U.S. and our bullied and/or bought partners in playing endless war); then laughter at things like the Humvee armor "solution", etc. might bring some relief. But I find myself somberly shaking my head in disbelief, because I know there will continue to be Vietnams, Iraqs, and Afghanistans for as long as the arrogant and unrepentant imperial mindset of American "exceptionalism" exists.
By "exceptionalism" you mean hegemony. Be careful what you wish for.
We should go to war only when there's an immediate, existential threat. There are always saner options otherwise, just that they aren't as politically satisfying and don't make military contractors rich.
I'm in a rare if not unique position with two close family members with intimate knowledge of Afghanistan: one a 6-year resident of Kabul during the late 00s-early 10s (married to a native, outside the "green zone") and the other an Army medical officer deployed there twice for a total of almost 18 months. Of course even their insider perspectives are anecdotal, but nothing they told me upended my 19-year-old armchair perspective that the cause itself was unrealistic if not insane.
I finally came to the conclusions that the cause wasn't about protecting America, fixing Central Asia, or the containment of terrorists and rival powers even if that's how it might have started. The wars have become their own ends with their own constituencies that lobby for the permanent expenditures. Entire careers, companies, and bureaucracies exist solely to support the effort. And like any other bureaucracy, the first priority has become to preserve their own existence and expand their domain. We're only discussing a departure from Afghanistan because they've already replaced that war with another one in Syria or elsewhere.
Afghanistan serves a very particular purpose within the Army at least (not sure about the other Services) - a combat command tour, which is essential to promotions above COL (O-6). When that is turned off, a box will not got checked in the old resumé building process.
This is why Thomas Jefferson opposed a standing army, and why every freedom loving person should demand that Congress must declare war on a country before our military OR CONTRACTORS are allowed to take any action.
The craven Congress is the holder of the shame
That's the truth there - please don't make us do our job. We want the blame to be on the President!
Makes you wonder if the continuity in government clause was secretly enacted. None of the branches of government really even pretend to be in control of foreign or economic policy goals any more.
No one we elect is able to do anything more than rubber stamp the white papers coming out of the (get paid what to)think tanks that the donor class own.
We didn't have an industrial base for war machines when Jefferson was in office.
I'm against a standing army too, but whenever I talk about reducing overpolicing (out domestic army) people go ape shit.
«a combat command tour, which is essential to promotions above COL (O-6). When that is turned off, a box will not got checked in the old resumé building process.»
Thinking "careers" indeed often helps. Someone from the UK Navy wrote an article saying that the UK navy still has many frigates not because they are useful, but because it is the smallest ship for which being the Captain counts as part of the promotion tickboxes, and changing the promotion tickboxes would be unfair to all those already in progress with the old tickboxes, because it would not allow promotion boards to compare like with like.
Meh. They're just going to change the rules to allow rowboat rentals at the park to count in the case of female officers. Because equity.
Definitely had nothing to do with terrorism. It's about global dominance over the peasants. Countries are too hard to control and keep track of and tend to defend their resources from exploitation by the elite.
Except that, for one reason or other, the US Military since 1945 has always tried to fight with an arm tied behind its back. We all know that the US could bomb any of these countries into the stone age - including civilians - but we choose not to. That's the bigger joke. Why fight if you really aren't interested in fighting, or don't believe that the enemy must be destroyed?
We pulled no punches with Hirohito. Or Hitler (and the Kaiser before him). Which is why neither Khrushchev or Brezhnev really threatened the USA in the Cold War era, not the Vietnam follies.
The only thing that happened is that the "fear" of fighting another war led to huge buildups in Pentagon spending and No Such Agency budget outlays.
The Low Intensity Conflict, a perennial favorite in DC and a constant money suck in overseas arenas.
Yeah, why do any of that when the moneyhose is turned to 100% already?
When you win a war you have to go home. You also are subject to other countries having input and splitting up the loot.
"We should go to war only when there's an immediate, existential threat."
That would only work if the military's function was to protect the homeland. That rationale isn't even our rear view mirror anymore.
When Trump announced his withdrawal idea a military contractor was caught on tape reassuring stockholders that they shouldn't worry because there will always be a conflict somewhere needing American soldiers. He should have added that, if there isn't a reason to send them, the US propaganda machine has armies of paid spinsters who will invent a reason & then sell it to rube, dim bulb America. It really doesn't take much anymore to make large swathes of America quiver & then wet themselves. That whole "home of the brave" schtick is just a sad and sorry joke these days.
BTW, I hope you meant essential not existential.
Trump's cardinal sin was not groveling before the permanent bureaucracy and supporting US involvement in Syria. Jim Jeffrey and his cohorts should be hanged for sedition because they lied to the President about troop levels and our presence there.
That is in no way hyperbole on my part. They directly disobeyed the CIC, lied to him, and bragged about it afterwards. At a minimum, they should be rotting in solitary for the rest of their miserable lives.
Go figure someone who said Trump was "not qualified to be President and Commander-in-Chief" and "would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being" wouldn't trust the Big Guy with honest info. A fantastic personnel decision among many. As always, Trump's sin was some variation on being a con man savant and an incompetent, muddle-headed buffoon otherwise.
No I meant existential. As in, essential to our existence, not Camus.
Alrighty then.
MT: "What’s your prognosis for what happens now?"
Adrian Bonenberger: "The Taliban already have, by fairly conservative estimates, the run of 80% of the country. So the Taliban are already there. I think the hope with Afghanistan was always going to be that we could support the Afghans who are interested in a non-Taliban government for enough time for them to get their act together.
If we continue to support them diplomatically and economically, they have a chance, but in the same way that the USSR supported their communist administration in Kabul for I think two or three years before the USSR fell apart. It held on. It wasn't doing great, but it was doing okay. I think we can achieve that.
If we can’t, then that’s the most damning indictment possible of everything that we did there, including the things that I did there that I thought were good, and was doing for the right reasons. It means that all of that was just pissing in the wind. The next time we do this, I hope we’ll keep that in mind and do it better, or not at all."
**********************************************************
Empire pissing in the wind - how many countries have we pissed on since WW2, telling the residents it's raining capitalism?
Great article, but why does everybody neglect to mention that Trump was getting us out this month, Biden SLOWED that timetable and possibly endangered it altogether. Biden's trying to take credit for leaving while screwing it all up.
Of course the media never once mentions this.
The entire peace treaty!
I don't blame you that you don't know about it because the media never reported it, but WE ALREADY HAVE A PEACE DEAL IN PLACE WITH THE TALIBAN. There's a reason they haven't targeted our troops in 14 months. We've gone right down the line doing everything we're supposed to do, and so are they. Right up until May 1st when we're still in the country.
If you're a member of the Taliban, what do you do at that point? You've given away all your leverage just to have the Americans say "fuck you." They're gonna start fighting us again, which gives us the excuse we need to stay.
Because we're breaking the treaty!
Why on earth do you think withdrawal on September 11, 2021 is any more likely than May 1, 2021? It's MUCH MUCH MUCH less likely, and the Taliban know it.
So, basically, the military-industrial complex is alive and well. Great. Good to know.
I do hope that Biden follows through and pulls every single soldier out of Afghanistan. I mean, seriously, what the fuck are we even doing there? This guy Adrian has to fight his way to and from some place just to make sure a 20 million dollar “school” is being used in the way it was intended? What the fuck is that?
However, it makes me worried that if Biden does pull the military out, where are we gonna go to war next? All of that money, that 750 billion a year, has to get spent somewhere. And that means a war (or wars) somewhere. Can’t we just slash the military budget by like two-thirds (or more) and spend that money here? On something that actually benefits the US? On healthcare, on the homeless, on infrastructure etc etc etc... Its fucking absurd, the amount of money that we spend on the military. And, apparently, it’s not even doing any good. The Taliban has 80% of Afghanistan, even though we’ve been there for two decades. Two decades! What the fuck?
I don’t think you get it. “Winning” is not the objective. The objective is to continue to funnel taxpayer dollars into the military-industrial complex, to fund never-ending “wars.” If we won wars, there’d be no reason for companies like Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, Boeing etc etc to get paid. The goal is to drag this shit on forever, with no end in sight.
What am I failing to comprehend? The gibberish you quoted?
"The USA will probably lose any Biden War, probably badly. The military elites are saturated with sociopathic careerists, mostly incompetent."
I openly ask for evidence of any unambiguous US military victory since WWII. You can say Grenada or Panama and I'll grudgingly accept it, but it's peanut-gallery stuff.
The World's Much-Vaunted Greatest Military Power has been getting its ass kicked by shoeless, skinny Somalis and Afghans for decades. I suspect, but cannot confirm, that this might have something to do with the DOD's business model of keeping most of the troops on gigantic bases where they can go eat at Chili's and stay out of harm's way.
zackly. And that is what minitiger notes: the GOAL of our military (the top brass) has nothing to do with winning conflicts, rather it's to make necessary, as much as possible, the ongoing flow of big dollah to defense contractors. This provides them with the benefits of being lobbied by said contractors as well as cushy jobs on retirement. Which is what e.pierce pointed out.
How the two of them managed to turn that into a "disagreement", when they said two different-but-perfectly-compatible (and largely true) things is mystifying.
The mythic archetype of Western Civilization, if not fully crumbled, seems to be in a shameful state of dilapidation.
'I openly ask for evidence of any unambiguous US military victory since WWII. You can say Grenada or Panama and I'll grudgingly accept it, but it's peanut-gallery stuff.'
Ok. In comparison to what? Who keeps the world trade lanes open for business - as ugly as it is? Why is Israel still on a map? What convinces Xi that only exporting a few free Hong Kong 'radicals' in the dead of night - rather than the en mass route Mao so often took - and - why is Miles Guo still living?
The only thing worse than AmeriKa and it's mistakes - is a world with the weakened America Obama has envisioned - who cant make those mistakes since they no longer have the power to do so - a theory we are rapidly moving towards as a final test...
Wish somebody with on-the-ground or in-the air-experience in the 1999 Kosovo fiasco felt like dropping details. If you have any good links, please post.
Who today believes that the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was "accidental?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_bombing_of_the_Chinese_embassy_in_Belgrade
Billy C. and Maddy A. were quite the pair.
Canadians financed a dam in Afghanistan. Our soldiers helped build it and protect it. Now there is no water in it and the road to it is falling apart. What is happening now was inevitable. We gave these people false hope and now they will suffer. These societies will only change from the inside. Better that we never were there.
I was a Camp Nathan Smith in Kandahar in 2011 when the Canadian made the right call and pulled out (see my post above). The new four-star, Gen, Chrystal, didn't think the Canadians were killing enough locals. The Dahla Dam project was a fiasco like most of the $150 billion spent on worthless infrastructure projects. Too bad the US didn't follow the Canadian's lead
Better we nuke em, one by one, if real reforms aren’t made on human rights....
That should help the women and children
Shorter misery.
Is it possible you would want to live a life of hopeless drudgery and rape over ending the evil that created it?
What is it about being married off to a creepy old rapist against your will as a 9 year old that you think brings serendipitous joy? Your 9th bday party is your wedding day, you get sold off and raped, but the humus that day was to die for....
How about, it’s not our problem? How about, the issues in Afghanistan continue to exist, despite the trillions of dollars spent and the thousands of US soldiers killed? It says right here in this interview that the Taliban controls 80% of Afghanistan. So, what? We spent 750 billion dollars a year for twenty years to make sure that 20% of Afghanistan wasn’t under the control of the Taliban? All of that money could have gone to fixing issues right here in the US. It could have gone to providing healthcare for everybody, paying teachers, fixing infrastructure and on and on...
Truly, 95% of our personal, domestic and international problems with others would be solved by stopping, thinking about things, then deciding it's none of our fucking business.
It doesn't work that way. Eventually somebody makes it your business. Ask Michael Corleone.
I live in Bridgeport CT. It looks like Berlin circa 1946. We MUST take care of our people and our country. AMERICA FIRST.
Bridgeport’s been a shithole since the 80’s...
That was precisely the problem in 2001. Attacks emanating from there were now our problem.
The same issues were brought up then - no invader has had much luck, we'd eventually leave without accomplishing much. We did it anyway.
Nuking the joint would at least have the virtue of not being tried before.
Remind me, how many Afghanis were part of the 9/11 attack? For some reason, I seem to recall the overwhelming majority of perps carried Saudi passports.
Afghanistan had nothing to do with those crimes. We used them to steal resources and put a chess piece on the chess board.
Best quote from Guttfeld about Afghanistan, “Afghanistan is where rubble goes for spring break”
Are you seriously advocating for nuking Afghanistan? If you are, you’re a fucking moron, dude.
Besides, woman in Afghanistan are just fine. If they weren't surely you'd have heard something about their plight fromj the dedicated feminists here in the West.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, even if you don’t feel a blessing of birth and privilege carries a responsibility to those less fortunately born, it is becoming a western problem. British Afghanis going back to acquire child brides. Is it ok with you then if child rape gets refugee status too?
Is it okay they get sanctioned and starved or bombed or shot to pieces ?
I feel so blessed that I think we should bomb the fuck out of an entire country for 20 years while sanctioning the rest of the world in order to starve everyone else around that country.
Um.... What? What are you even talking about? “A blessing of birth and privilege”? Check your Google translate. And no, it’s not okay with me if a kid gets raped, but apparently a twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan hasn’t stopped that from happening. So probably we should just move on. Or out. Or something.
What about being bombed and maimed by a drone attack or having your family wiped out while you hobble around all burned with missing limbs all in the name of bringing "democracy" to your country ?
At least it contains possibilities for improvement.
The odds one miserable life outlives the slow evolutionary growth of Islam.... hopeless by comparison.
You have to not let it work.
Seriously, entertain the idea that the women abusing, child raping Islamic cultures got the idea it was change or be completely destroyed....
Ok. They are so low iq they prolly would go for systemic destruction....
And the world would be freed from a tyrannous sky god....
None of you tards would have a prob going after Roy Moore for courting a teenager... wut is it about child raping goat herders that hits ya in the feels?
Posit: you are super respectful of the planet’s Southern Hemisphere because you’re limp dicks. You’re scared you really will be Charlie Hebdo and so your contort nonsense theories about YT being the scourge of the earth and turn a blind eye to widespread child rape through enforced marriages against their will.
What to do is a problem. One opens themselves up to accusations from the Russel Brand crew just by trying. Nevertheless, those are real women and children, homos, heretics and infidels who are suffering in Afghanistan, with or without America and Russia’s proxy wars
We have enough Christian woman abusing, child raping going on with our own Christian culture.
How about we solve our own issues so we actually learn how to fix it before we try to "fix" someone else's culture ????
Besides, the cost is far too high to the Afghani children since it means turning their country into a rubble pile and getting them hopelessly into debt to the actual terrorists on Wall Street.
C’mon Skutch, clutch em and speak out against them goat herding, child rapists.
You a big balled he man.... speak out, loud and clear for us
Hate to interrupt your rant, I really do, but you may want to get your hands on a map and locate the equator.
Ok. Hate to ruin a good rant so I will check that tomorrow
Understanding that we can't "nuke" anyone, without having the radioactive fallout carried by the weather come clear around the Globe into our *own faces, right ? Even Regan finally came to understand that concept of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction).
The nukes used during WWII were nothing but "marbles" compared to the destructive capacity of today's atomic weaponry. "Nuke 'em" is a call for global suicide. I wonder how many outside of the military fully understand it that way.
I generally ignore the "just nuke 'em" crowd as the unserious who think Dr. Strangelove is a documentary. Still, I'm amazed how many otherwise informed people don't understand the political and military problems with "just nuking" the people we don't like.
That and Afghanistan was and is more of a failed State than a county, so you would not be bombing the country responsible for 9/11. You would be bombing a paramilitary group that set up shop there along with an awful lot of innocent people who had nothing to do with 9/11. America would become a permanent pariah in the world and if you think as 5% of the world population we can just go it alone, you really are unserious.
Well, of course, what you have touched upon there, is the serious "dumbing down" of the U.S. population, at least since Reagan seriously set out to do exactly that in 1980. That administration started out by removing "Civics" classed from Public Grade Schools, bcuz that was the first course that encouraged "critical thinking" in children, and taught them about the way the U.S. Government is *supposed to be made up of Three CO-EQUAL branches establishing a system of Checks and Balances *intended to prevent Monarch Presidents in the U.S. People who feel welcome to join in discussions of complicated issues with ignorant contributions like "Nuke 'em" simply expose their own absence of intellect. I am personally very fond of a particular quote:
"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt." ~ Abraham Lincoln
I think that's a really good take. I also think many American's are froze in time with America and Europe dictating terms to the rest of the world without needing to worry about the consequences.
I see occasional comments here about how either Europe of America should not have allowed another other country to do something. It's as if they are present at the Sykes-Picot agreement and deciding the fate of the rest of the world. That was WWI and we have come a long ways ever from WWII when everywhere but American was in rubble. This idea that any country can act on the world stage today without serious consequences within a largely pluralistic system in not realistic.
Very well analyzed ! It all puts me in mind of an old Al Stewart song "Year of the Fox", where he includes the old Mystic's Observation "Oh, the more it changes, the more it stays the same." Even today, we have a country in the form of Russia that just "casually" takes the Crimea away from the Ukraine, and suffers nothing but a social "cold shoulder" from the rest of the Western World. Just like the mass killing here at home, we are fast approaching a point where "Thoughts and Prayers" are quickly wearing out, and predictably demonstrating their well-known impotence.
Seriously, if you don’t defend female agency, childhood free of enforced marriages, genital cutting, homo lynching, infidel terrorizing (let’s just acknowledge the new found “respect for Islam” is cowardice of ending up like Charlie Hebdo), heretic murdering, barbaric public beatings, choppings, murdering, the freedom from religion and the protection of liberal societies such as they are.....
It’s your cowardice.... you aren’t more nuanced or intelligent... you’re simply rationalizing your cowardice.
Human rights was never the real issue. window dressing in order to sell the war.
Maybe so. The guest in the interview indicated it is a motivation for those wearing the boots on the ground.
At any rate, in a country where might makes right and the most vulnerable, ie little girls, are traded like chattel to be domestic/sex slaves to old creeps and told it’s the all powerful SkyGawd’s wish she be so used, I got no problem with that.
that is exactly why I can view the soldiers of a war as noble and the war corrupt and deceptive. Soldiers and citizens are sold bullshit in order to fuel a different objective. That is the crime I find unforgivable.
Believe this: to those who are living a life of misery, the western ‘tards acquiescence with the evil perpetuating their misery matters.
If you believe otherwise, I don’t know what else to say on this.
I am not a fan of wars of aggression by the US.
The alternative, a naive refusal to observe the trends, is equally distasteful.
One offers a hope of changing course.
You know, at any time the so called geniuses of the Democratic Party could offer a middle way and denounce the goat herding child rapists, loudly decry the mutilation of girl children genitals in service of some religion inspired focus on female sexual purity, take a strong position on honour cultures and their violent cultural response to infidelity, heresy, infidels and homosexuality, etc etc etc....
But I won’t hold my breath. It’s cool and hip to be Sarsour but being Ayaan Hirsi Ali is hazardous to your health, and western liberals are nothing if not performative about courage whilst consistently cowardly in the face of real oppression.
Might makes right all over the planet to this day. Go stand under some of our bombs or live under some of our sanctions. No one in the US military or government gives a rat's hairy ass about those little girls or anyone else not rich or on TV.
You're so indoctrinated you're still spewing the same demonizing generalizations CNN/Fox/MSNBC was in the early 2000's.
I would love to see you debate Ayaan Hirsi Ali. That’s where the reality for women and girls, homos, heretics and infidels “rubber” hits the road.
You cuck sucking western ‘tards are able to excuse any barbarism as long as the price is paid by women, children, homos, heretics and infidels, stupidly betraying your belief - like the US govt of the pre 9/11 era in their arrogance assumed - that you will be removed from the consequences of the worlds least tolerant and evolved reproducing faster, in bigger numbers and without female agency.
I think you've proven yourself to be the least rational person to ever post on the internet with this gem.
I guess no girls, homo's, heretics or infidels have been collateral damage over the last 20 years inside Afghanistan or the other 7 or so countries targeted by the 5 eyes cabal then ??
Hilarious that anyone still buys this "belief" that we're in the middles east to liberate the people that live there !!!
You are a very special kind of troll, Galleta !!
You’re calling a lot of military personnel liars, not me.
Yet you repeat the same lies and advocate for the same non working solution.
oh, right. A final solution.
Your plan?
no, "better we nuke em, one by one" is YOUR plan.
I'm not obsessed with Power and Control, to the point of decreeing "obey or die!" to the human populations whose ways include features that offend me.
Yeah. I get it man. You sooooo cooool. When you see them short Islamic women’s paraded by in sacks with slits for their eyes, just pat yerself on the back ‘tard... you helped that little girl to a life of non control by ‘tards.
Let them girl children and women hope in another 1200 years, Islam will evolve to allow em to bleed before the attempt to breed.
That's a sneering caricature and a generalization that's quite sweeping. But for someone who plainly favors annihilation as the optimal remedy for the problems afflicting the societies that you speak of, I doubt that it matters.
Espousing that policy isn't likely to win over many undecided people to the cause of Zionism, either. But I'm well aware that there's a strain of thought embraced by some (although not all) Zionists that basically views all non-Jews as a lost cause as far as sincere sympathy or authentic alliance anyway. An attitude all too reminiscent of the certitude that differentiates paranoid psychosis from mere wariness and vigilance.
You make this about me because you are a craven coward that would stand by and watch girl children married off before puberty to British (or American or New Zealand or Australian or Canadian ear European) Islamic creeps against their will, to live a life of servitude and rape, dressed in a sack and paraded down your sidewalks rather than confront a undeniably illiberal culture you invited in and greeted at airports with welcome signs.
Now they are determining what children are taught at public school.
Fuck outta here you piece of human crap
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan absolutely achieved their sole objective, which was to transfer an enormous amount of money to the defense industry. Mission Accomplished indeed.
In the documentary "A Good American," Bill Binney recalls overhearing a new NSA "executive" telling his former employer--a big contractor--"We can milk this for about 15 years,"--referring to 9/11.
War is indeed a racket !
We seem to relearn this after every war, then forget it by the next one. From "Remember the Maine!" to "The Lusitania" to The Gulf of Tonkin, the government doesn't even bother changing the play book since they know it will work every time.
I think the real problem here is the naivete of the general public. No war is clean in any age. There were issues on both sides. If we were going to be Solomon, the reasons why might be meaningful, but we aren't. We just fight on one side or another, with more or less justification. The stupids read or hear their press coverage and start being sappily patriotic.
Reading the after-the-fact bs here is funny and sad at the same time. How many voices were in honest opposition when the AUMF was passed? But then a few years later, when the Blackwater video showed people what real war is like (yes, it is like that sometimes), then they were against it. When they saw Abu Ghraib and people being led around on dog leashes and such, it was so, so terrible, but every war I have ever heard of had that kind of thing and worse. Much worse.
Clausewitz posited that war was an extension of politics/policy by other means. Why people get so shocked that those other means give license to sociopaths and psychopaths in uniform is the part I can't get.
If these same people ever got to hear the very loose relationship between the rules of land warfare and how such warfare is conducted, even by the US, their panties might twist up so much they'd never be straight again.
Well, you can say naivete, but you can't deny that the naivete is a result of being misinformed. And there, I think the absence of an adversarial media sector is key. The efforts towards making the media more monolithic should be considered actions inimical to the American public.
Doesn't EVERYBODY get a chill when gov't officials or Big Tech execs claim they "just want to stop the spread of misinformation"??
yes on the misinformation crap. That just sounds like propaganda to me.
That said, the public was no better informed about actual warfare in the 1960s-70s, 1950s, 1940s or 1910s. Or in 1898-1904. What they got from the media was a very much more sanitized view of what was happening than today. They got pictures of a flag raising on Iwo Jima but no pictures of all the corpses piled up, severed limbs, etc.
In the 1860s, people were all too well informed of what was happening. But war has changed a lot since then.
If your son got killed in a battle in the 1860s, it was likely (if you had the means) you would take the trip to the place where he was killed to recover him and bring him home. Railroads at a certain point refused to carry bodies unless they were sealed in iron caskets. They'd had too many issues with leaking bodily fluids over weeklong trips back home.
Fun fact: Did you know that during the Civil War there were cases where bodies were embalmed by morticians who followed the troops around like camp followers, and then they refused to give the corpse to the family unless they paid the costs, which they hadn't agreed to in the first place.
Today, you get a closed casket (mostly). A triangular box with a flag in it. A lot of condolences and $100k or so. Your relationship with the ugliness of war and combat death is minimal.
Confirmation bias....
When the Russians were in Afghanistan I can remember CBS Dan Rather gleefully promoting U.S. support for the rebels(Taliban) as a kind of payback for Vietnam. The Soviets had dared to support a government that had advanced women into professions like teachers and doctors. So we gave them stinger missiles to avenge the affront while our Saudi allies "educated" them in their fanatical Wahhabi doctrine. It should have been no surprise that those who train dogs to be vicious end up being bitten on the ass.
The whole "giving Russia it's Vietnam" idea was from the father of Al-Qaeda : Zbigniew Brzezinski
ZB must've had Kissinger-envy.
No, he had a visceral hatred of totalitarian states - consider his life experience.
Dan Rather is such a weasel
Russia has done more for women's rights than any other nation that existed.
This may be because you don't want to piss Russian women off.
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/775-confirmed-kills-one-picture-1945/
I have never heard that story before, thanks for posting.
So that’s where SMERSH came from.
If SMERSH is staffed exclusively by sexy Slavic peasant ladies who know how to pull a trigger, politics be damned. I'm all in for totalitarianism.
Have not kept up with Handsome Dan's geopolitical reportage in about a decade, but I remember his pseudo-anthropological journalism packages from Kabul for 60 Minutes before that, as recently as the 2nd Bush Administration. He/his producers reliably highlighted the Western-friendly man on the street. This really was as misleading as 1970s news-magazine media explaining the world from a French-style hotel in Saigon
And yet, Rachel Maddow can without irony, and certainly without evidence, decry the anonymous CIA claim that the Russians are paying the Taliban “bounties” for killing US soldiers. And she will never, ever apologize for spewing this nonsense.
I lived and worked in Afghanistan for seven years (2008-14) for USAID as both a contractor and federal employee. I share and can corroborate the "you'll never believe this" stories and misguided experiences Mr. Bonenburger recounts in this article. As a "wrap" on the MRAP fiasco, I was at Kandahar Airfield in in 2013 when it became the largest chop-shop in the world: hundreds of the unwanted MRPAS (rollover prone, maintenance nightmare, gas guzzling behemoths ) had to be cut into scrap metal so Taliban would not get them after the base closures and drawdown of US forces. (The Soviets just left their tanks and armored vehicles behind and their rusting hulks noe litter the Afghanistan landscape as a reminder of the last failed foreign invasion/occupation of the country.)
I, too, wrote a memoir on my experiences as a "nation builder" in Afghanistan, as well as the year (2007-08) I spent in Iraq during the surge there when the burn-rate of US tax dollars was $10 billion/month. Think of how many airport modernizations and high-speed rail projects this money could have funded. I titled my book "When Will We Ever Learn." Just google my last name "Enzweiler" in the Amazon search bar and it will come up. It's free for Kindle Unlimited.
I chose this title because I was on Guan as a 2nd lieutenant USAF officer in late 1972 when the B-52s and KC-135 tankers from my base in SD mercilessly bombed Hanoi and Haiphong. As diplomat John Negroponte later remarked, "We bombed them (the North Vietnamese) into accepting our concessions." I recalled this quote one night in 2014 before I left at KAF as I was awakened by the F-16s taking off on another raid on some hapless Afghan village. As things have since transpired in Afghanistan (and as I predicted in in 2017 book), our country once again got involved in another foolish "war of choice" and carried out merciless bombing campaigns (with Trump and Mathis/McMaster in the roles of Nixon and McNamara/Kissinger) knowing the war effort was a lost cause. Once again we immorally bombed the local national resistance fighters (this time the Taliban) into accepting our concessions -- and got the same deal they agreed to ten years ago. It was "deja vue all over again" for me, as I recount in my book.
The details are often the result of narrow mindedness and incompetence, but most of the "useless" invasions the USA does have sound geopolitical aims, in the case of Afghanistan (and several other places) the main aim was to reduce it to rubble to deny it to others, specifically to landlock Russia and China. Some of the key words to understand the geopolitical significance of Afghanistan are Chabahr and Gwadar.
Excellent piece. This is why I signed up for TK News.